Natural Selection by Libertas Magazine

LIBERTAS

t he natural selection issue Vo l . 1 7 , no. 3

SATREBIL editorial CO-EDITORS IN CHIEF Design Emily Romeyn | Managing Vincent Weir POETRY Lucia Stacey & Tim Rauen FICTION Madeleine Brown NONFICTION Claire Ittner FILM Riley Ambrose MUSIC Will Stratford CRITICISM Colin Thomson YOWL Charles Pennell

contributors Emily Romeyn, Vincent Weir, Lucia Stacey, Tim Raven, Madeleine Brown, Molly Dolinger, Harrison Dent, Jessie Blount, Meg Mendenhall, Colin Thomson, Brian Correa, Charles Pennell, Jacob Cole, Michael DeSimone, Vera Shulman, Ismene Nicolaou-Griffin, Brian Happell, Prab Marwah, Olivia Booker, Chad Salter.

LIBERTAS N o v em b er 2 8 , 2 0 1 2

Vincent Weir & Emily Romeyn

Editors’ Notes

Tim Raven & Lucia Stacey Ismene Nicolaou-Griffin Harrison Dent

2 4 11

POETRY Quail Sex Sea-Words Quail Bait

Jacob Cole Meg Mendenhall

3 12

FICTION Escapement Action Good Seeing You

6 7

CRITICISM Reflections upon the Election The Case for Twitter

Brian Happell Vincent Weir Anonymous

Michael DeSimone Prab Marwah Will Stratford Vincent Weir Vera Shulman Emily Romeyn

Olivia Booker Chad Salter

YOWL Donkeys Defeat Elephants, 303-206 Dear American Electoral College Poems by Yowl

9 9 10

MUSIC Michael’s #Relevant Music Picks Competition & Compromise Recent Musical Evolutions

INTERVIEW BearTrax

2 3 FC MH 1 BC 7 11

ART Quail Illustration Pianist Illustration Natural Selection Masthead Graphic Emily Romeyn’s Editor’s Note Libertas Last Word: Girlfish Illustration Quail Illustration

editors’ notes. Close but not Enough Evolutionary Criticism Proclaims Itself the Heir of Theory. Is It an Imposter?

f you’re one of those scrappy intellectuals dying to know what comes after postmodernism, you’ve probably considered Evo Crit. It’s what we got when we added biology to English, and until the last few years it was the best contender for Theory’s Next Big Thing. Evolutionary Criticism began a decade ago when around twelve lit scholars started preaching Darwin to B.A. departments. The idea behind the movement is simple and remarkably consistent: use evolution to explain why humans make and appreciate art. Led by the preeminent disciple Brian Boyd, Evo Critics argue that because art is universal (all human cultures and even some animals make extraneous decorations) it must arise from processes rooted in biology. Once we discover what these processes are, we should be able to analyze them with the scientific method. English, in other words, needs spreadsheets. It needs natural selection taken seriously. Throughout the last decade, Evo Crit gained media attention with laughs like Madame Bovary’s Ovaries and era-announcing titles like On the Origin of Stories. The latter example— Boyd’s unambiguous attempt to rewrite Darwin—came out in 2009 from Harvard Press and currently heads the syllabus of Davidson’s materialist theory seminar. In the pages of this issue, Will Stratford (one of our editors and a student in that course) gives us a good example of Boyd’s Evo Crit in action (see page 10). Like the Marxism that preceded it, Evo Crit selects for charismatic followers willing to pit their theory against entrenched ones with a strident tone. Two examples: “While the established forms of study in literature and cinema have

been drifting into disarray, the evolutionary analysis of human nature has been maturing;” and, “We reject both the radical skepticism that denies the possibility of ever gaining reasonably objective knowledge along with the practice, so regrettably common in literary study, of looking for evidence only in support of our hypotheses.” The list of near-propaganda analysis goes on. Still, the problem with Evo Crit isn’t with its rhetoric as much as it is with the movement’s general direction. As a New York Times blog post suggested in 2010, Evo Crit is simply another attempt to venerate English by attaching it to something else. Whether the anodyne is Marxist history or Freudian psychology (or even structuralist anthropology), English has tried to diagnose its own sense of failure with other disciplines. This isn’t to say that history and anthropology haven’t brought enormous value to English (however shortlived or subject to immediate dispute). But it is to say that we go wrong when we forget what made English worthwhile in the first place: close reading. Close reading, close cousin to the love of reading, begets Evo Crit and deconstructionism alike because it constantly searches for new ways to make texts interesting. It’s a process not a result, a skill not a product. English will always be searching for the Next Big Thing—awareness and fashion drive the discipline. But behind the revolving door of style lies an interior that rarely changes. As long as it produces close readers, English will survive to create the trends that give it life.

Vi n ce n t W eir

LIBERTAS, Vol. 17, No. 3

Naturally Selected Em i l y Ro m ey n

l i ua

x e s

Tim R a v en & Luc i a S t a c ey

Ve ra S hulman

LIBERTAS, V o l . 1 7 , N o . 3

ith a perfect arch, my fingers kiss the polished keys. There’s a book of sheet music in front of me, but I haven’t needed it for years. A sense of excitement builds as I ease into the exposition. This piece is one of my favorites, a more obscure arrangement of “Georgia on My Mind,” in which a sweetly disharmonic melody and a passionate bass part build into an explosive climax, the culmination of an artist’s vision. It’s a familiar, comforting conclusion, like rereading a cherished novel or reuniting with an old friend, a coda that provides a purifying sensation of finality. I was supposed to be at work an hour and a half ago. I come into the office eventually. My boss’ heels click down the hallway with a sharp staccato as she shoots a piercing glare my direction. Surprisingly, my mood remains dour. I slink over to my cubicle, the soulless chamber in which my “in” tray runneth over daily. There’s no definite beginning or ending, no variations, no moments of excitement or clarity, just another day’s endless slog of paperwork. Let’s take it from the top, I think to myself as I resignedly sit down at my desk. Human Resources needs funding to promote employee retention. Maintenance needs money to replace a collapsed fire escape. This needs a signature and that needs to be approved and this needs a recommended amount and that needs a signature and this needs to be forwarded and that needs to be authorized and I need to get the hell out of here. Facing the varnished piano lid yet again, I fill my living room with the sounds of life: those of passion, of idyllic childish joy. All the song’s elements coalesce perfectly into a blissful transition, a caged bird stretching its wings for the first time and gliding out toward the open skies. How magnificent it is to be brought back to life by something as wondrous, as all-encompassing, as purely gratifying as music, sweet music! It feels

like it’s all behind me now, all the files and spreadsheets and numbers that make up my tiny, tiny existence, the paper zeroes that haunt me with their intangible gravity. The tension in my neck vanishes, my muscles relax, and my mask of frustration morphs into a face of perceptible calm as I exhale with satisfaction. While readying myself for the next song, I feel my phone vibrate. I have two new emails, one from my boss scheduling a performance review for next week, the second from my divorce attorney. I stare blankly at the screen for a few seconds, then place the phone facedown on a table behind me. Sometimes the little things can just get in the way of what’s really important, I reflect as I begin Bach’s “Prelude in GMajor.” Springing into the jubilant melody, the keys light up before me, my fingers dancing up and down the scale vivaciously as I laugh blissfully. I laugh and laugh and laugh with gusto as the baroque melody carries me through the night.

ES CAPEMENT C

J ac ob Cole

V er a Shu lman

LIBERTAS, Vol. 17, No. 3

E A W

Can the word that defines me provide me with Unadulterated filters They despise me with Nothing more than the body that my jeans can fit Telling stories of the past of my mothers’ clit – Sirens singing songs sans promises

Cascades of pre-existing post-motherhood Crises – drowning in Cs of blood – Unassumingly taking the word that the rest of me was built around of Naturally, but not vulgarly, but also not symmetrically, To use it against me in its own self-loathing, self-referential iconolatry – Sometimes the sirens silently sCream, as They CouNT the word CoNTeNTiously. Ism ene N i c o l a o u- Gri ffi n

LIBERTAS, V o l . 1 7 , N o . 3

Underground Evolution A Year after Releasing His First Track, Davidson Grad Explains His Ascent to Tech House Notoriety While most Davidson students know

Michael Brun, the Haitian DJ who last year joined Steph and Woodrow as one of Davidson’s greatest dropouts, fewer know his friend,

Ehsan Akbari.

BearTrax

A 2012 Davidson graduate and fellow Deep House producer along with Brun, Akbari began his music career only a year ago. Yet, if label contracts and Twitter following are any indication, Akbari could be Davidson’s second most famous musician to date. Better known by his producer name, BearTrax, Akbari is now positioned to become an international player in Deep/Tech House. Our interview shows why: LIBERTAS (V.WEIR): For a newcomer to the DJ/producer scene, you’ve achieved incredible success. Your first EP peaked at #30 on the Tech House charts, your tracks have appeared on international DJ sets, and you’ve already signed with two record labels—all after starting last October. Can you take us through some of the most pivotal moments of the last year and describe your major breakthroughs? BEARTRAX: Thanks for the compliments. Perhaps the most pivotal moment was getting started. I spent last summer in Paris where the underground dance scene inspired me to download Ableton and go for it. European dance music is pretty different from the dubstep/prog-house that’s dominating America now, even if the European producers trace their style roots back to Detroit Techno and Chicago House from the ‘80s. I guess I was most drawn to the non-commercial nature of their work. Because I’ve been part of non-commercial musical traditions throughout my whole life (I’m a classical/jazz violinist and a heavy metal vocalist/bassist on the side), producing underground dance music felt like a natural progression. I love House and Techno because music, not money, is the main motivation. That made sense to me.

been posting for 2.5 months. Working with the label was tough initially. The manager beat up my productions and pushed me to improve them, but he always believed in me (at least I think he did!). I’d say my next pivotal moment came when my first release chart so high on Beatport. I never thought I’d see my name up there with heavyweight artists but it happened. I give the credit to the music itself and to my label, along with all the efforts I put into marketing the EP online via Twitter, Soundcloud, and Facebook. Social media is so important for emerging artists today. LIBERTAS: Speaking of Twitter, your Twitter account has over 33,000 followers and grows by about 100 followers a day. What tricks can you give other artists trying to reach that number through social media? BEARTRAX: If you’re on Twitter be friendly. Follow your followers, give other people retweets and return the favor if they help you out. Social media is all about being friendly and helpful.

LIBERTAS: You’ve recently switched from the genre of Tech House to Deep House. What are the differences between these genres? Who are some other artists we should look out for in each?

After I started producing and posting my stuff online, my first major breakthrough came when the manager of an Italian label (Kontrol Records) shot me a message on Soundcloud and said he was interested in helping me release on the label. That really hit home because at the time I had only

BEARTRAX: Tech House has more emphasis on hi hats and the songs are usually a little bit faster. Deep House is usually slower and has a bit more soul and emotion that comes from more sung vocal parts.

continued on next page...

LIBERTAS, Vol. 17, No. 3

continued from previous page... Most artists that produce one usually produce the other genre so I’ll just name a few producers I’m bumping to at the moment: Justin Martin, Sacha Robotti, Eats Everything, Joris Voorn, Danny Daze, Maceo Plex, Subb-An, among others… Check them out on Beatport. LIBERTAS: Typical of today’s music industry, your success hasn’t translated into dollars yet. What else are you doing to get by? BEARTRAX: Like I said above, money has never been my motivation for making the kinds of music I do. Whether it’s heavy metal or Deep House, music has always been the primary motivation. If I make money doing it, hell, that’d be awesome, but I’ll never compromise my music. My main motivation is to try and add to the rich musical culture that I’m part of. I’m in it for the long, slow burn, and I intend to release music for the next few years as I build a reputation based on music, not selling tracks. That said, most of the money comes not from online music sales (who buys music these days?) but from getting booked to play shows and DJ events. But you gotta build your profile as a producer with releases and get your name out there to get booked. To get by, I’m doing a Teach for America type program called AmeriCorps, and I’m holding a position at a nonprofit in Charlotte called Hands on Charlotte where I help manage an afterschool program at a nearby elementary school with students below the poverty line. LIBERTAS: You’ve just finished applying to law school—are you interested in law related to intellectual property and file sharing? What are your opinions on this contentious issue, especially as an artist?

BEARTRAX: Definitely! IP is a huge part of law that’s on the rise not just in music but in many fields. I’m planning to give it a try and see if it makes a good career. But file sharing. It’s a controversial issue and there’s a lot of progress to be made. The big record companies have plenty of money and lobbyists to throw at the Feds, and when they send people to jail or order them to pay reparations “to the artists” for downloading their music, the artists rarely see the money because it ends up back with the record label. I believe the music industry needs to adapt to the new game and I do not think that cracking down on file sharers is a positive long-term solution. It does not benefit the artists. LIBERTAS: After graduating Davidson you moved to Charlotte, which has a growing reputation for EDM. Can you tell us a little about the local music culture? What clubs are worth visiting? BEARTRAX: Charlotte’s House scene is pretty small but there is one club that plays has brought some big international acts to town: Dharma Lounge. Hit me up and we can go chill there one night.

twitter

@RealBearTrax

facebook

facebook.com/BearTrax1

Reflections upon the Election A

re-elected president now looks forward with a renewed appreciation for bipartisanship. President Obama drew outstanding numbers for an incumbent in a weak economy and won a clear electoral victory. We Libertarians congratulate him. Yet the closely divided popular vote echoes the reality of a split Congress—both of which remind us how hard it is for America to choose between only two options. With this difficulty in mind, the election carried other significant results. Gary Johnson and the Libertarian Party tallied 1,139,562 votes for 1% of the popular total. Though still a small fraction of the whole, this number more than doubles the votes any previous Libertarian candidate has ever received. Considering the fact that many Libertarians voted Republican because of the close race—and that earlier polls put Johnson’s national support at 6%—this record-breaking statistic understates the true level of Libertarian support. Libertarians now run in most local elections and receive hundreds of thousands of votes. No longer a subordinate fringe of the Republican Party, the Liberty Movement’s growth will soon require both Republicans and Democrats to work with Libertarians on policy. To see the gains of Libertarianism, we need look no further than the legalization movement. This Election Day saw half a dozen referendums on marijuana, as Colorado and Washington voted to legalize its recreational use and Massachusetts made it legal as a medicine.

B ri a n H a p p el l

from the College Libertarians

Federal interference in these issues could prove disastrous. Marijuana legalization will likely mitigate the violence of drug cartels by lowering prices to a level where killing no longer makes sense. If it does, America cannot afford to stand by as drug wars ravage Latin America with bloodshed and overpopulate our justice system with victim-less crimes. Furthermore, as both a secular and religious institution, marriage should not be controlled and defined arbitrarily by the Federal Government. We cannot allow government officials to give the legal benefits of marriage, society’s most private institution, to some and not others. The Obama Administration now has an extraordinary opportunity. At this critical juncture, it could move forward toward liberty or backward toward the disastrous policies of the past. We Libertarians hope the campaign signs were accurate. Marriage equality also won major gains. For the first time ever, states (Maine and Maryland) approved same-sex marriage through the ballot box. Now seven states in all support marriage equality. Yet, while these referendums mark powerful advancements for social liberty, the Federal Government may yet interfere. Federal law still considers marijuana a Schedule I controlled substance, so possession, use, and sale are still criminal acts on U.S. soil despite state legislation. Meanwhile Federal Defense of Marriage Act continues to deprive same-sex couples of the legal benefits of marriage.

LIBERTAS, V o l . 1 7 , N o . 3

The Case for Twitter

How a Russian & a Wine Bar Convinced Me Twitter Can Be Art Vinc ent Weir

wo weeks ago I went down to Atlanta for a job interview. After a morning of sleek hotels and a super-day of handshakes and beer pong (the office planned its “college celebration” to coincide with the interviews) I found myself on the perimeter of downtown, at a wine bar with an old friend. Our subject was Twitter and my friend made the first move. He graduated Davidson in 2011 and has been teaching private school English ever since. “Here’s my theory,” he said as we sat in the dim fire of screens and tinkling wine glasses. “Twitter is the democratic novel. People read novels to escape the world they were in, to identify with characters and follow them as they develop. With Twitter we just have more control over the characters who make that text. “Also when novels first came out,” he continued, “very few people thought they were legitimate art. Critics hated them for their mass appeal. Parents criticized them. ‘Get out and do something,’ they’d say, ‘You’re not living your life you’re just sitting around in a virtual world reading someone else’s.’” The analogy seemed interesting but weak to me. Sure, they’re both diversions, but novels don’t have character limits. More importantly, Twitter doesn’t have a narrative structure. It doesn’t have a beginning or an end. It doesn’t have rising action. “Hold that objection,” my friend said. “I want to focus on something bigger than narrative. It’s pretty meta, but I want to focus on the way novels use language. Help me through this. Let’s say Twitter creates a system of language that closely resembles a novel’s system. More importantly, they both create systems that resemble the language humans naturally make. In other words, we live the way novels and Twitter say we do. There’s something about Twitter and novels that makes you say ‘that’s me’ when you read them.” “I see where this is going,” I said. “You’re taking us to Bakhtin.”

becoming a major reference in contemporary thought,” as “one of the most important theorists on discourse ever.” These claims may sound extravagant, not only because Word’s 2011 spellcheck doesn’t recognize Bakhtin (it suggests “Bikini” and “Yachting,” both capitalized), but also because the fellow died 35 years ago. Indeed, the most remarkable thing about him is how long ago he wrote and how much longer it took us to take notice. Productive during the height of Soviet repression, Bakhtin’s career (1919-1975) illustrates the paradoxical benefits of obscurity. While high profile thinkers all around him disappeared into gulags, Bakhtin escaped notice and survived. His was an off-brand of natural selection. A genius far ahead of his era, Bakhtin’s most enduring contribution pertains to language, which he saw as a massive system controlled by two forces. In 1934, Bakhtin used those forces to describe the power of the novel. Today we can use them to understand databases like Twitter.

LIBERTAS, Vol. 17, No. 3

midst the diversity of heteroglossia, Bakhtin also posited a supervening “centripetal force” that held meaning intact across dialects. Working in harmony with the centrifugal force, centripetal energy allows distinct voices to coexist in a system and “ensures a maximum mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life.” Like the musical laws governing harmony, the centripetal force brings the different voices of heteroglossia into a harmonious arrangement that people understand. Like tannin in wine, it binds the organic compounds of language together.

Twitter

The Centripetal Force

Bakhtin’s great example of unity amidst diversity was the novel, which he saw as a “system of languages” made of “relatively autonomous voices subordinated to the stylistic unity of the whole.” For Bakhtin, the novel was the most massive collection of language a single person could arrange. It contained the voices of many characters, but ultimately cohered into a single work. It was the best available technology for organizing chaotic voices into an orderly, systematic whole.

Wine he philosophy of language is a lot like wine. Both are complicated and distasteful to early patrons. Full of foreign names and unfamiliar jargon, both language and wine couple an air of sophistication with the possibility that their experts might be frauds. Still, wine forms an indispensable part of fine dining, and similarly, philosophies of language form an essential part of deep-reaching discussions. Let’s stay with this analogy for a moment. Barolo, a tannic red aged in the Italian Piedmont, was until twenty years ago a best-kept secret of the wine industry. Regarded by various sommeliers as “one of the world’s best wines,” “the king of wine,” and “at the very least, the best wine in Italy,” Barolo nevertheless suffered underexposure and derisory prices through the ‘90s. That changed when trends favoring sweet, “accessible” Crémants gave way to mass appeal for Barolo’s longer-aging taste. Often associated with “tannic austerity” and “mysterious, complicating” flavors, Barolo captures all these descriptions in its nickname, “the intellectual’s wine.” Mikhail Bakhtin is, in many ways, the Barolo of language philosophy. Though it took him decades to gain attention in the West, and though his tannic style may render him unfashionable to some, the Russian-born theorist is quickly becoming one of the most valued thinkers in the world. The introduction to a recently released Kindle-version of his work claims that Bakhtin is “quietly becoming the most important critic of the 20th century.” Other critics from the last six years agree, noting that Bakhtin is “rapidly

system of language to respond to its culture. This centrifugal force allows a diversity of voices to exist and keeps them separate. Like the yeast dissolving sugars into alcohol, heteroglossia turns the grapes of language into something more difficult to digest.

O l i vi a B o o k er

The Centrifugal Force

hirty years before deconstructionism, Bakhtin noticed an entropy that dissolves language into chaos. Within any language, he said, dialects and jargons compete in “contradictory” and “tension-filled” voices over words. The word “drug,” for instance, belongs to several connotations and culture groups, all of which compete for the word’s top association in our mind. Bakhtin called this chaos “heteroglossia” and noted its temporal and political bent away from centralized meaning. The centrifugal force of heteroglossia distorts “unitary language” into “languages that serve the sociopolitical purposes of the day, even the hour.” In other words, heteroglossia makes language a dynamic system. It allows for the interactivity of user-input. It allows the

akhtinian language theory has direct analogues for the database. Like the novel, search engines contain a chaos of voices subordinated to logical unity. In Bakhtin’s time, novels were the avant-garde medium critics dismissed as an insignificant cultural fad. Today we see that same attitude toward Twitter. My friend and I had both read Bakhtin and we were ready to bring him into our conversation. “I like the idea of taking Bakhtin’s language theory to the database,” I said. “But how is Twitter a database?” “Well, besides organizing content and indexing it for searches, Twitter also gives users the ability to filter content according to their preference. And just think about the hashtag. It’s the perfect illustration of heteroglossia: all you do is click the word to see what other discourse communities it’s a part of.” “So we can continue your novel analogy by saying Twitter heightens the novel’s power to make ordered systems from contradictory voices. We can also say that it unifies the heteroglossia of language with the logic of search algorithms and scrolling feeds,” I queried. “Exactly,” he said. “Now let me ask you a question. Of all the novels that have ever been written, do you think most of them are good or bad?” “Definitely bad.” “And yet, when I talk about the artistic value of ‘novels’ you immediately think of the best novels—The Brothers Karamazov, Pride and Prejudice, etc.” “Yes, and I see where you’re going. When you mention the artistic value of Twitter, I immediately think of all the bad Twitter accounts I follow instead of the best ones.” “Yes, you’re recognizing an important element here. Twitter needs an advocate if it’s going to compete with other art forms for a place in the canon. It needs someone who can talk about it’s medium specific virtues: live tweeting, retweeting, branding elements, feed synergies, character limits—everything that makes Twitter’s art form unique.” “Yes,” I said. “We need a Bakhtin for Twitter.”

YOWL DAVIDSON’S NEWS FOLLOWER

Donkeys Defeat Elephants, 303-206 Chicago Team Wins National Championship, Hearts of America

n a stirring victory earlier this month the Chicago Donkeys scored more points than the Boston Elephants, thereby winning the Division I National Championship and also the hearts of America. “Thank you so much to our fans,” said Donkey quarterback, Barack Obama. “No seriously, thank you. We couldn’t have won this championship without all those points we scored—or, less directly, without you guys. This championship and the hearts of America belong to you. No really. I am not just saying that.” Prior to the game, league officials considered restructuring the championship to make commonsense and simplicity more of a factor. Instead of basing the results on complicated rules that are impossible to explain to a 3rd grader, the league considered using a more self-evident device to decide the champion. “I know I’m going to sound like a complete idiot when I say this,” said one official, “but what if we made the Division I National Championship straight-forward and sensical, you know, like it is in Divi-

sion II? I call it ‘meritocracy:’ whoever beats all the other teams in a playoff or brings the most fans to the stadium wins. It’s so simple it just might work.” “That is probably the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of,” said another official. “Why do you think our forefathers spent all this time inventing a complicated system that uses completely arbitrary value assignments and gerrymandering to decide the champion if we’re not going to use it? First of all, this is a tradition, and second of all, fuck you. No really, go fuck yourself.” The win, which marks the second consecutive head to-head-victory for the Donkey franchise over the Elephants, guarantees four more years of subsequent victory in Division I. Earlier that day, the Donkeys also secured a Division II National Championship in a 53-45 nail-biter over the Elephants. Meanwhile the Elephants were able to fend off the Donkeys in Division III.

poems

L W YO

Dear American Electoral College, I struggle with life’s big choices. Do I want to wear jeans or leggings? Shirts or a dresses? Thank god for jeggings and tunics. Normally, I’m chastised for my indecisiveness. But not during presidential election season—the quadrennial months when you make me feel like the most valued, intriguing person in the United States. All that nagging from my mom and past boyfriends about my uncertainty and lack of drive becomes worth the attention you so generously bestow. Thanks to you, I’m pandered to, monitored, and sought after by some of the most important leaders and media outlets in the country. I get to participate in fun panels. Everyone wants to know what I think. I’m fascinating; even Diane Sawyer thinks so. Take that, Mom. Once perceived by society as part of a plentiful group of couch-surfing, parents’basement-dwelling underachievers, I’m now rare and cryptic, like a unicorn. But beware: imposters abound. I met another undecided voter—or so I thought—at a bar last week. We shared our feelings of confusion and disillusion and mystification about the system, the Man, and the establishment. We talked about deep stuff, like oil and weed—I totally thought we bonded. But disappointment soon struck. As he opened his wallet for some cash to close his tab, I glimpsed his California driver’s license. The poser rambled on as if his (lack of) opinion—or brain—somehow mattered in an unswingable state. But unlike him and thanks to you, my vote actually matters and thus, so do I. Secret partisans are even harder to

spot. Like me, they revel in the media attention; in fact, they’re swiping it from me. No matter that my neighbor has voted a straight party-line ticket for his entire life; he delights in watching partisan pollsters squirm as he describes himself as unaffiliated or independent. But that’s so not me—I totally voted for Nader in ‘04. Because of my open-mindedness, I get twice the free political gear. I put bumper stickers on everything I own: water bottles, coffee cups, bulletin boards, my office cubicle, and actual bumpers. I place the stickers in side-by-side pairs: Obama/ Romney, Democrat/Republican, NRA/ PETA, et cetera. My Prius is the only surface I excuse from my non-partisan sticker-sticking; an Obama sticker on a Prius is just redundant, so I slap on a “Coal-Miners for Mitt.” You know, for balance. (So what if I’m an office temp). I wouldn’t want anyone to think I am a simple, narrow-minded partisan—or worse, decisive. So thank you, America, for entrusting your future to me, recognizing my virtue, and making me feel super-important. Sincerely, Undecided Voter* Dayton, Ohio *Correction/Update, 11/07/2012: The letter should be signed just “Undecided.” In our follow-up with Undecided Voter, she relayed that she never actually made it to the polls, citing her ultimate inability to decide.

“Natural selection”

COMMENTARY

Natural selection  national election  vaginal erection  bacterial infection  arterial dissection  pastoral correction  magical connection.

The author(s) suggest(s) a connection between the nature of nature and the nature of magical nature. But the characteristic theme of the work is not sublimation, but its sub-sublimation. Thus if we use a Baudrillardist simulacra, we can choose between expressionism and the post-textual paradigm of consensus.

“Nature’s midlife crisis with God”  jaguar jaguar jaguar jaguar jaguar jaguar conflict

ant  mouse  cat  dog  wolf   lion

God self-cast as God through selective breeding and mass extinction  God is good  Paradox metaphor  Aunumawnapiah    Think Connect; feel  Run - where  Eat, again. more. enough.  Better, Faster, Stronger .  .   .  .  The Song Remains the Same   -Nature Grrr.... aggression ignites the calm

COMMENTARY The author constructs an elaborate relationship between the virility/stealth of the jaguar and the plurificence of nature. We use the term “plurificence” to denote “expressionism” in Sartre’s sense—that is to say preappropriation, not depreappropriation. This expressionism culminates in the nonsense line “Aunumawnapiah,” which subverts the material paradigm of narrative into a subdialectic socialism.

LIBERTAS, V o l . 1 7 , N o . 3

picks

music

michael’s

#relevant M i c h a el D eS i m o ne

WHITE DRESS

Yo fuck you, Kanye, first and foremost. Fuck you for making Cruel Summer just 12 tracks so you could release Cruel Winter a few months later. Fuck you for going trap. Fuck you for working with Two Chains. And Fuck you most of all for making a song that made me fall back in love with you all over again. Every aspect of “White Dress’” production feels necessary, down to the quiet handclap. The central vocal sample (which came from “Game’s All the Way Gone” feat. Mario and Wale [Rap cracks me up]) is reminiscent of College Dropout Kanye while also somewhat darker and more worn. The track reaches bliss at 1:34, when all of the production falls into place, Kanye locks in his flow, and I feel like I’m driving off into the sunset. You would also enjoy: “Dat Ass” by Earl Sweatshirt and “Westside, Right on Time” feat. Young Jeezy by Kendrick Lamar

good kid, m.A.A.d. city Kendrick Lamar

I mean the whole album. I was going to say “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst,” but then I thought about how I love that song because of the emotional climax that comes from the skit before it, the beat that lulls you down after a hectic 45 minutes, and the thematic implications that only come when understanding the motifs that have been developed over the course of the album. good kid, m.A.A.d. city is a concept album that is entirely the sum of its parts. While you might be able to enjoy any song off of this album independently, you only can love these songs when experiencing them together. I don’t care if you only listen to damn metal. As a service to music you need to listen to this album. You would also enjoy: “Blessed” feat. Kendrick Lamar by Schoolboy Q and “Reagan” by Killer Mike

LATCH

I have no idea why I did not feature this last month. This is the song you get if you take a SBTRKT and Sampha duo and made it 15% poppier. Disclosure’s production is mirthful and celebratory. They created a song that makes you want to dance and have sex because it makes you feel so happy that you could definitely go for some super happy dancing and sex while listening to it. Sam Smith’s voice leads this celebration with his radio ready-sound. His climax breaks out into screaming and his lyrics make it seem that music brings the party out of him as well. You would also enjoy: “Hold On” feat. Sampha by SBTRKT and “Changes” feat. Heart Streets by LOL Boys

Kanye West

Disclosure feat. Sam Smith

THE FLOWER LANE Ducktails

The Ducktails/Real Estate gap is slowly closing up! Even compared to Ducktails’ last release, Ducktails III: Arcade Dynamics, Matt Mondanile has begun to move away from the lo-fi sound that was Ducktail’s staple. I am not complaing! That last Real Estate album was fucking amazing. I loved every song of that thing. Using my super math major skills: if Ducktails = Real Estate then Ducktails Album + Real Estate Album = 2! Real Estate Albums. I’ll take that math every day! You would also enjoy: “So Many Details” by Toro y Moi and “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards” by Tame Impala

Competition & Compromise W h y A r ti s ts M u s t A d ap t to Ru l e th e Food Ch a i n

daptability. It neatly sums up the idea of natural selection in one word, right? And as a music artist, producer, or DJ, it’s one of the most important skills you can have. In order to be successful, artists need to please their audience. This doesn’t mean abandoning creativity but it does mean compromise: finding the most profitable balance between what they want and what you can give. My friend and professor Charles Bernstein, composer for the original Nightmare on Elm Street and the music credits in Kill Bill and Inglorious Bastards, gave me a lesson in adaptability I’ll never forget. “Anyone who wants to succeed in the music industry needs to do one of two things,” he said. “Either invent a unique style and sound that people recognize and demand, or become a chameleon and learn to mimic other styles.” I’m someone who thinks of music as a form of self-expression, so this advice bothered me at first. More recently, however, I’ve come to realize that it’s possible to achieve self-expression through mimicking. It’s important to learn other styles, not to copy and paste, but to build them into a repertoire that eventually becomes a signature style. Perhaps the most popular example of adaptation in recent history, Sonny Moore is a case in point. Once the front man for a post-hardcore group, Moore took his experience in a little-known genre and applied it to electronic dance music (EDM); he is now better known as Skrillex, the 3-time Grammy award winner. 9 LIBERTAS, Vol. 17, No. 3

P ra b M a rwa h

Likewise Kelly Rowland, a successful part of the power trio Destiny’s Child, switched genres when she realized R&B was losing steam. Since 2009, she has sung on numerous house music tracks, collaborating with EDM superstars David Guetta and Alex Gaudino. By appealing to a new demographic and a new genre, Rowland managed to maintain relevance for at least another couple of years. Besides crossing genres, artists can adapt by mastering different parts of the music-making process. In addition to song writing, tracks also require arranging, editing, mixing, performing and recording—all of which fit under the category of production. The more skills an artist masters, the more likely he’ll survive. Dr. Luke, the American song-writer and remixer, is a perfect example. He started out as a guitarist on Saturday Night Live, but now produces, records and writes the majority of Top 40 hits we hear on the radio. “Party in the USA?” “Wide Awake?” “Die Young?” Thanks to Dr. Luke’s expertise and intervention at multiple steps in the production process, those songs made the airwaves with great success. My main point here is that, in regards to music, competition is just as healthy as zeal. Competition encourages every artist to do the best they possibly can, to learn as many different skills as possible. There are ways of adapting and maintaining a signature style at the same time. Those who master it are the sharks who rule the food chain. Those who don’t…well, that’s just natural selection.

Art practices are selected for, according to theories of cognitive evolution, based on a variety of possible advantages they may provide, which may be cultivated through functions like play, information-processing, sharpening sensitivities and facilitating social cooperation. Will Stra tford

Top songs: Getting There feat. Niki Randa, Tiny Tortures, Sultan’s Request, See Thru to U feat. Erykah Badu Top pick: Heave(n),

play

Animal Collective’s Centipede Hz exemplifies human adaptation that derives from play, specifically social and cooperative play. If Merriweather Post Pavilion was the culmination of their ongoing musical maturation, Centipede is their self-conscious reversion to their animal roots. Abrasive and worldly, the centipede-like sequence of noise-filled songs suggests the evolutionary advantages in flexibility of action, if not the disadvantage of zero restraint--but hey, we’re just animals, this album reminds us.

untidy assortment of independent local cultural invention

Discrete mutations occur amongst local tribes, resulting in notable variation across the same species. Witness Dirty Projectors, a rare story of a (seemingly) self-made aesthetic. Swing Lo Magellan is no exception to the band’s predilection for shrill guitar plucks and even shriller vocal textures. Nonetheless, this album immediately strikes me as less lavish than the celebrated Bitte Orca. The compositional style varies from track to track, but we see a common pattern: punkinfluenced, guitar-heavy rock ballad swinging to acoustic, singer-songwriter serenade and back again. In general the vocal melodies take a more direct plunge into the mix, which accounts for the absence of the vaster dance atmosphere of Bitte Orca. We hear the musicians share the podium in egalitarian cooperation, and I can’t help but wish that it was more of the David Longstreth show (after all, one good cell can mean a world of difference in evolution). Top songs: About To Die, Just From Chevron, Maybe That Was It, The Socialites Top pick: Gun Has No Trigger

sharpened sensitivities

byproduct of adapted minds

Natural selection teaches us that the improved capacity for complex physical and mental performance is what constitutes evolutionary advantage. Like Grizzly Bear’s Shields, Tame Impala’s new album Lonerism exhibits the natural consequences of adapted minds. Tame Impala’s second full length album to date, Lonerism doesn’t stray from the classic rock psychedelia of Innerspeaker as much as it reveals their conscious efforts to sharpen the band’s composition, style, and overall aesthetic. Tame Impala has become a better listener both to its influences and to itself. In doing so, the band wins my award for conscious mutation (sorry chimpanzees, you’re still living in the past), striking our ears as a work of musical adaptation in its own right and bypassing the slow evolutionary timeframe all at once.

Top songs: Yet Again, A Simple Answer, Gun-Shy, Sun in Your Eyes Top pick: Sleeping Ute

Top songs: Be Above It, Mind Mischief, Why Won’t They Talk To Me?, Nothing That Has Happened So Far Has Been Anything We Could Control Top pick: Apocalypse Dreams

LIBERTAS, V o l . 1 7 , N o . 3

Musical

Top songs: Today’s Supernatural, Applesauce, Wide Eyed, Monkey Riches, Pulleys Top pick: New Town Burnout

By this point in their career, there’s no question that Grizzly Bear has adapted a natural band chemistry. With Shields, they move us through a smooth and altogether collected musical experience. Mellower than the last two albums, Shields doesn’t wow us. Rather, it heralds a smart “cognitive play with patterns” (Brian Boyd’s naturalistic definition of art), garnering the evolutionary disposition for information-processing. Not surprisingly, it rewards re-listening. Despite its patient pace, however, many of its best moments leave before we get to sink into them. Like the last two albums, it achieves at times that distinctive Grizzly Bear atmosphere–a pull into transcendent and ethereal space–but we are frequently lulled back into the mere sounds of instruments playing in tandem. Nonetheless, those vast, atmospheric moments are as entrancing as ever. In fact, I’d venture to say that if Yellow House is the cohesive album-listening experience and Veckatimest the album of discrete songs, Shields is the album of moments, like the verse in “Yet Again” or the chorus in “Sun in Your Eyes.” This is why I always return to “Sleeping Yute” as my favorite: it meditates on the same basic gesture for the whole first half of the song, riding it out to its full conclusion.

Recent

We’ve all gotta make money, right? Well I’m convinced that Flying Lotus released Until the Quiet Comes with the sound knowledge that it would send some money his way. It’s not that the album isn’t engrossing or doesn’t have his unmistakable touch. It does, but it still feels like he could’ve done most of it in his sleep. With minimal layering (for FlyLo), stripped-down composition, and an emphasis on tight textures, it showcases a practiced home-recorder playing with his favorite toys. But his temperance renders the album’s soundscape a bit thin at points. Unlike his last two radically innovative albums, this one doesn’t present itself as an adaptation in its own right. We don’t see the same conscious mutation here. Nonetheless his creations are always organisms that reward serious attention.

Evolutions

survival and reproduction

quail bait Let me be your first. Budding breasts, I’d love to suck. Small feathers, I yearn to pluck. I’ll hunt you for your meat And cradle your cracked shell. I won’t bite. I’ll catch you soaking wet By rivers of bestial Fantasy. No, I’ll find you in the grass Shaking your succulent Bragging butt. I will not share you With the selfish sky. I’ll shoot you Stiff. I’ll clean you Dull. I’ll swallow you Whole.

H a rri so n D ent

C h ad S al t e r

LIBERTAS, Vol. 17, No. 3

GOOD SEEING

Y OU R

ichard was talking to Geneva Sanderson, a fat, eccentric old woman in a beaded limegreen Christmas sweater and rings that pinched her fingers like tied-off balloons, about what he might call a troublesome case of vicarious hypochondria. “But more than being a slight annoyance to me,” she was saying, “I’m convinced that Kenneth’s sleep apnea could also have something to do with his poor circulation. But then I keep thinking—what if he’s anemic?” Richard, despite being a practiced conversationalist, was an expert on none of these issues. He wasn’t even a doctor. The best he could do was nod sympathetically and hope that Geneva’s stream of plaintiveness could continue unbroken until a third party came to his rescue. And, in fact, that rescue soon arrived in the form of his daughter, Amy. Twenty years old, short-haired and slight and smiling, leaning her head against his arm. She proved, then, more affectionate than she would have without the two (or three) glasses of wine Richard had obligingly passed her over the course of the evening. Geneva eyed the bright new bird on Richard’s shoulder and ruffling her gaudier plumage, excused herself to land elsewhere. “Are you having fun?” Amy asked her father. “Probably more than you,” he said. “I actually kind of like people.” (This was his way of teasing his daughter’s somewhat reclusive tendencies, inherited from he knew not which obscure branch of her ancestry. She was the only one in Richard’s family—probably the only one in his entire social sphere—who preferred being alone to the company of others.) “I’m having plenty of fun,” she said, smartly draining the last of her wine to punctuate the retort. “Anyway, what I came over to tell you is that Mom just texted me that she’s about to drop by.”

And that was when Grey, the evening’s debonair and beaming host, approached the pair. He made some predictable, falsely selfdeprecating remark (“Hope we aren’t all boring you too much,” maybe) and Richard offered a predictably polite protest. He examined his old friend, particularly the lines that now traced his features, which either had not been there or had gone unnoticed at last year’s Christmas party. His beauty was still there—the green eyes were there, the combed and shining black hair—but something had softened about that beauty, so that it no longer seemed the striking, impulsive force that throughout their youth had counteracted Richard’s own thoughtful practicality. It was a predictable lament, he knew, but still— there it was. Grey was talking to Amy (Had Richard been too distracted to even follow the conversation? Worse, had he been standing there slouchfaced, like an unmanned puppet?), and they covered the usual topics: her school, her interests, her future. Richard knew well that people liked to talk about the stages of life they had already passed through, particularly the most pivotal stages—they advised, forewarned, directed. Learn from my mistakes. Let me tell you about my mistakes. “But then that class turned out to be a giant mistake,” Amy was saying. “The professor assigned bi-weekly papers, and it didn’t even count towards my major.” Richard and Grey laughed empathetically, and the latter said, “Who knows? You might end up needing to know that sort of thing in the future.” Which was Richard’s chance to step in with all the academic achievements his daughter was too modest to mention, an opportunity he never missed. It was a spiel he performed like a musical impromptu, manipulating the variations of context and transition as he saw fit but keeping the overall theme pretty much the same. His love for his daughter warranted the artistry of it. A good deal of the monologue Grey had probably heard before, but Amy garnered prestige each year—and who knew what Grey could ever remember of Amy? Grey, in the meantime, nodded and grinned and maneuvered the complicated facial labyrinth of apparent engagement, which Richard at least appreciated. Grey didn’t have any children of his own, preferring instead to exchange the red plastic cups and nonchalant swagger of his college days for wine glasses and ingratiating bachelorhood. The chief irony of Grey’s independent lifestyle, at least the way Richard saw things, was that Grey had introduced him to Deborah, back then.

“You must be proud,” was Grey’s disappointingly banal summation, and a signal that the subject had grown wearisome. So Richard asked about Grey’s life, because—another trick Richard had learned over the years—no one objects to talking about himself. And because Grey’s gaze was beginning to drift casually among the faces of his partygoers. A telltale sign of a bored socialite. Everything’s fine, he said. Calm. Mother’s still sick, of course, but let me tell you what happened between these people you used to know much better than you do now. At what point had Grey become the Old Friend? Maybe it happened back before he—before either of them—even knew, back when Richard became a father, or a husband. And then Amy was looking at her phone, and Richard remembered what he had been doing. “Honestly, he hasn’t changed at all,” he said to Grey. “But listen, I have to make an exit. I still have some work to do before I turn in.” They both knew that this was a lie, but hopefully Grey would understand—and he did, with a simple, fixed gaze and the words, “Don’t work too hard. It was good seeing you.” Then Grey returned to his party. Richard left his daughter then, and the drinks, and Grey’s little white house. He found his car well down the street. It was December, and cold, and his fingers were dry as they fumbled for the keys in his pocket. Cold nights made the strange apartment harder to return to, but the home had gone to Deborah, and he was no longer welcome there. She could have it, though. Despite the injustice, he still loved her. But that didn’t matter. Driving back up the street, he wondered once again why he was so afraid. Plenty of divorced couples remained friends, or at least were willing to see each other. For the sake of their children. But he performed the whole thing like a hurt child, and—there!—there it was, his reason, he was driving past it. There was Grey’s front door, and there was Deborah, in her black coat, the arches of her calves, her dark tousled hair and her unfathomable smile as his grown daughter opened the door and welcomed his ex-wife into his old friend’s house.

M eg M end enh a l l

LIBERTAS, V o l . 1 7 , N o . 3

LI TAS last word

E mi ly R o meyn