nobody is here. I'm Bill ball, come next to me is Norie Miller and over
here is I believe it's David Greenberg and both of you seem to be involved
somehow with architecture. I'm, I'm merely a musician and I, I don't
really quite know what I'm to talk about the media except I have a few
thoughts about it and I've also been asked to somehow deal with the
integration of the media and ourselves.
Recently. I happened to read an article and I wish I had made notes of it
more carefully. Bye. A computer scientist, a very prominent one who's at
Columbia in new york. And he had said that we have really misunderstood
several things about our own particular creation up to now and that is
where we are organic creatures and we feed ourselves by, oh my, let's wait
for this.
Well, all right back well we are actually organic creatures and like the
rest of the mammals and other animals on the earth. We feed ourselves
actually by buy food that we have created a large number of creatures
which are in their own ways. Also alive except they are powered by
electricity or thereby gasoline or in other words, other sorts of things.
And the fact is that these actually possess life in some strange way as
much as we do. And there was any, any engine or any electronic gizmo is
actually a living creature in so far as we are feeding it and it must be
fed in the same kind of way. That was one interesting thing in the words
were really driving a live automobile, We're turning on a live television
set. These are all creatures, each of which have a certain amount of
ingenuity, individuality and individual ation despite the fact that we
have made them all in some sort of a mass produced environment. So the
point being that we really have already created something which although
it isn't life in the same kind of way that we are, it really does have
some of the attributes of life, even though they are probably robotic and
simplified and smaller in application than any one of us and so on. He
said that the great advantage of this whole world of creation is that it
does not have in its own potential. Any of our old activist IQ fight and
flight,
similar kinds of, you know, things that were constantly worrying about in
our own way, our tendency toward war attention toward killing each other,
our tendency to over using the environment and so forth, because these
things aren't built in to the computer or built into any kind of
electronic device or any kind of engine. And so that in the end their
world that is built by these creatures as it looks increasingly, it might
be um, will not have the troubles that hours have because there won't be
any emotion involved. Well, all right now, how does this involve with the
question of us in the media? Well, let's take some of the very most
pervasive phenomena in the media for example, mostly television and all of
us now are living in a world of television. I was born before television
and many of us in this room were born and remember what it was like before
television. But there is of course a large, large number of people have
known nothing else but and the actual facts of the machine that we have in
our homes, how it operates, what it does to us, the fascination of it. And
even the way how it cuts up time, the way that we have somehow accepted as
someone of our basic language norms, the effect of film cutting the fact
that they're judging positions rather than perhaps perhaps a a long kind
of Exposition of any kind of thought. We are not ready as the 19th century
was to have a story told to us detail by detail by detail and some slow
and rolling sequence, but rather something that's done in a very quick
telegraphic fashion without any need toward transitions. The transitions
that used to be, for example, in the older filmic medium that dissolves
and things like that, for example, don't seem to exist hardly any more
except in the sense of sort of a nostalgic reminiscence of what films used
to be back in the old days when we did have to have dissolved. We have a
very quick kind of thing. This has done something to us that has cut us
into a certain kind of kind of rhythm which has had a definite effect upon
us. And this I probably would be one most immediate kind of things. Why
have I been so fascinated by this? Because as a composer, I've had some
insight as to what this has done to the musical form of a musical piece.
Whereas perhaps maybe in a large Beethoven symphony take something like
the Eroica, which is a very large, hugely built, carefully balanced
structure, something that does have a sense of a very strong beginning
from. I'm taking the opening movement if you're familiar with it and it is
a very, very long, extended kind of thing. Built on balance is built on a
sense of sequence, a sense of beginning in a sense of end, in a certain
sense of uh kind of a natural, what seems to at least the 19th century
kind of progression of events, each of which are important in a plot sense
toward the end of the thing that might be considered one polar opposite to
what might be considered. Now, more likely kind of form. That is to say
that the unrolling of time that is by cuts by sudden moments by
juxtapositions, by perhaps maybe a lack of interest in an overall
structure, but rather by momentary kind of form. And this has had some
effect, I think, and probably all of us, we tend to think in this kind of
way, one of the reasons that that commercial television, which is a
prominent television in the United States is closer to the lifestyle of
most people is because it is so fragmented because it also doesn't require
us to be there all the time. I'm sitting there watching a public tv movie
, it's the cabinet of dr caligari they are playing at the old 1919 movie
and my my wife says God I'd like to go to the bathroom, I can't do it now
with the with the commercial tv one, can you go get yourself a snack,
There's other kind of things, the telephone rings and so on and we're
dealing with a very discontinuous kind of life. The forum has that same
discontinuity. Now this is good and this is bad. There are certainly it
means obviously a different kind of texture in our use of time in our
media. It certainly shows one very important thing that the media itself
is strange and implacable and that somehow it's natural to it to do. So it
isn't important to television what it is showing. No television set gives
a tinker's damn what it is broadcasting at that particular point, it is
just simply there being a receptor. It is showing us what all of the
electronic impulses look like on our screen. They don't care particularly
what's on them now. I think that probably this is part of the reasons why
as it happens because of the way it seems to be made because of the
fragmentation of the thing. Because of the one pointed nous of the two
that we are dealing with a different way of handling time. Now, what I'm
struggling with as a composer and as a musician, as a performer and as a
general involved person with the whole society is how I can cope with this
change in the handling of time and the handling of moment. A two won't be
from now to then because I think this has enormous implications on how we
do tell a musical story, how a thing happens to enroll in the events. And
this is of course my basic dealing with and that is dealing with time and
of course this is why I have I suppose been asked to talk about this
situation of the integrating the habit in the environment because we
certainly must take into account what these things have done to us. How
much do we want to have them continue to influence us without any kind of
feedback on our own? How can we deal with this seemingly fragmented
unrolling of time and find some sort of higher unity so that we can really
be able to deal with a more coherent kind of structure. We can tell what
has to be said in a more complex and full way. How can we, in other words
, deal with this thing? So it is no longer our master but we can make it
happen for ourselves.
Would you like Uh huh uh huh very briefly, the only thing is I think that
um it's sometimes dangerous to regard things which are developing and
things which are changing is necessarily evil. I didn't say what, I think
one can look at what television does is okay, what is that doing that?
This is part of a process. I think you can see the kids can learn very
much faster then they could at a certain time and accumulate a great deal
of information very, very quickly and very, very concisely. And I think
television is teaching that rather than schools and this may be good. This
maybe not their attention span is certainly a great deal less. But what
happens is that people change and are influenced and create the what I'm
talking about of course is the it's gonna be easier to deal with this. I
think I can't bother to let's take it that way. Okay. And then you can you
can both get into it and I said what I'm talking about of course is the
nature of what we learn and how we learn and how it's been changed and I'm
trying to understand this in The light of how it has influenced us. I mean
what you're saying is that that television is a wonderful teacher, but as
a teacher of a different sort than a person getting up in front of a class
or a person reading a book, which starts on page one and ends on page 500
and we go through this very carefully linear kind of thing. Now we've been
told and probably rightfully that the old linearity is a thing of the past
and that we should now start looking at things in a much more global kind
of way. And I think some of this is true. I'm not saying that this isn't
necessarily the natural next move. What I'm interested is in the details
of how this has changed our perception exactly, exactly.
Is that you've been making it?
Should I say, should I say something magazine? Mm hmm. Mm for about
for well, in the first place, the subject being integrating habitat,
environs and media. Uh, it's obvious to me that that's what this is,
that's what we're doing now, uh kind of in an experimental way here up in
salaries. Um, it's, it's uh, it's a pity there aren't more experiments
like this available to more people uh where uh, these are the subjects and
where people, you know, get involved in thinking about these things. And,
and I think people is, I mean the integrating of the, of the habitat, the
environment, the environment and the media. I think uh, the glue is the
people. Um, if this is gonna happen, it's gonna happen through the people
in other words for the most part. Um, I don't think that the media will
ever become anything more important than it already is. Uh, by itself. but
somehow with some process of the people taking part in some way. Uh and
the environs, I mean, uh people have to take part in that. And there are
some people that there's some that say that people do take part in that.
For instance, I heard an interesting
lecture by paul Rudolph recently in Los Angeles, where he refers to
everybody uh for instance, in the city of Los Angeles that they are all
urban designers and that the person who's mowing their long is an urban
designer and is involved in in in the process of dealing with the
environment. Um
the media to touch on some things that you've said about the media. I
think that the, that the media has an incredible potential to learn it
exists for anybody to learn from it exists right now. Uh I think also the
environment, the environment has an equal, incredible potential for people
to learn from, in other words. Uh if you go out in the morning, you get up
in the morning, you go out into Los Angeles or any major city in the world
and you decide that you're going to start learning from it and go around.
I'm looking very carefully, then you will learn from it. Uh you will, uh
one of the interesting things that happened in the sixties at the end of
near the end of the sixties, when multimedia was real big and and they
were doing all these multimedia shows and and all that and then a lot of
people kind of backed off it at one point because they were afraid of
media overload. Uh, that you can watch too much tv or you can too many TVs
on at the same time and radios itself and that, uh, I think what really
happens and uh, Marshall McLuhan has, has done some, some studies on this.
Um, there is no such thing as media overload. When it comes to people. In
other words, machines overload. People don't overload. Uh, what happens if
you happen to be watching a multimedia show or two or three movies at the
same time or two or three stations at the same time or if you happen to be
just driving through Los Angeles on freeways very fast and happened to be
very observant and you know, we're looking around a lot. Uh, what happens
is, one doesn't overload. What happens is one sort of goes on to the next
level one. Uh, no longer. Uh, uh, what what happens is that you almost
subconsciously you start going to this other gear and that other gear is a
kind of a pattern recognition and when you're watching television and some
in the ways that you have to watch commercial television these days. Uh,
and not only are you broken up by commercials, but a lot of people keep
switching the stations, I mean, and, and what happens is, and you're still
learning even though there's this little, uh, I think even more so because
I think television allows you to go on to this next level of pattern
recognition, which is beyond any of the, you know, sort of the, the linear
ways of learning. And uh, you you don't learning the way where you come up
with answers or anything, but you learn in a way where you're constantly
turning your own mind into a almost a useful computer in a sense that
you're just taking in the perceptions and you're not, uh, what, what, what
television, I think what television is allowed, uh, are the younger
generation to do, which, which has not really been allowed previously
because of such linear inequalities to the arts and to ever enter the
cities and everything. And when television has allowed as a kind of a um,
just perceptive in other words, you watch it and you get this perception
and that perception. I don't think television really deals with concepts.
I think it's alien to that media. I don't think the city of today, the
20th century city, Los Angeles Houston or whatever. Uh, Las Vegas. Uh, I
don't, uh, it's the same kind of, it's the same sort of kind of thing.
You're kind of, they're not concepts. I mean, Los Angeles is not a
concept. There are some 19th century cities that are concepts what what
McLuhan says, which is kind of interesting, which, I've been very much
influenced by lately, is that uh is that concepts really aren't, they
don't do you much good these days because everything is going so fast that
by the time you've really formulated a concept on something has changed,
the world has changed, it changes too fast. And that really the way to
learn the way to perceive the environment, The media uh hesitation is a
kind of uh you don't even try to make up concepts, you just take these
perception that they eventually, if you've taken enough and you have to
take them without making any judgments, you just have to look at them and
then they will become patterns. And I think the media as well as the 20th
century city, whether it's american or not, I think is really allowing us
to learn in a whole different way and to make more kind of intuitive uh to
relate to things more intuitively rather than kind of intellectually
conceptually uh putting together concepts take too long and it is not
valid by the time you figure it out. And that I think that that's uh that
the city can teach us and the media can teach us about this sort of this
other level of thinking. And I think it's this is the kind of thinking uh
that I think will get us into the future and if we're not able to think if
we're not able to flow with uh the processes that we can, you know like
that the media presents us with the the contemporary city, then we won't
get to the next century and that and that the way we're gonna get there is
just letting it happen for a while and just letting it through and and and
taking these perceptions and eventually it will turn into something. I
think I feel positive. That's the problem. I think many of us faces. We
have really at least in many cases I know I have gone through that process.
I've tried the just general wash, I sat there and had a wonderful time
being passive and uh went through it all, watched the whole thing, tried
the experiences, having sat there and I've done it for a good long time.
You know what? I'm bloody bored. I'm tired really of just sitting there
being a passive animal watching it all going with the flow. I really am.
I'm tired of it because I feel that it is not humanly satisfying to me as
an animal as I exist. I haven't yet learned how to become a computer. I
have not yet learned to become the machine that this man at Columbia says
there's probably an ideal state. And you think that the world in general
has reached that point? Don't you think this active interest in sports is
an example of something which is far beyond you. Why why sports? Why
particularly sports? You know what I mean? Is that the world seemed to
enjoy passive uh huh activities for quite some time. And suddenly the
interest in running and tennis and all these other things seems to
indicate a change. Well it's for several reasons obviously it's also a
kind of a biofeedback of a kind I mean you feel something by running, you
go through all these things, you feel all these things and it's all, it's
still a very private experience. But there are also communal experiences
that can be had and can be continued to be having. One of the fact that
we're all sitting here means I suppose you're looking for someone and
you're looking for one kind of communal experience that we're all to be
here to have. But we have, we have communal experiences with television. I
mean I haven't said it is not possible and I still love television, I love
it for what it can do. I, first of all I have to sit there and I uh I was
robbed a couple of times and recently the insurance man was very kind and
gave me enough money for a first rate television. So I got a beautiful
Sony at home and it makes absolutely wonderful pictures and I must say I
have to get over. I mean the jewel like the clarity is gorgeous. I sit
there and all the technological marvel that's right in front of my room
there and I keep thinking what director I have to watch in order to watch
these beautiful pictures and and I've seen so many things and and you're
dealing now with with, you know, what person who's immersed himself from
having never had television from sort of hating it from growing up as a
musician. Where the point I had really spent all those early years of my
life practicing and composing and being involved with an entirely
different kind of of wash kind of wash of a constant music going through
the head, which is what is still my first experience. My basic language
will always be music. I'm a musician, I'm a born and bred musician, but
I'm fascinated by the time uh, relations in television because in that way
do are alike music in what's happened to music because of the fact that
you're dealing with this fragmentary experience. And what I'm saying now
is is there any way we can deal now with the body politic in some of the
kind of way, the ultimate um, ultimate experience to me for television. I
don't know, I come back to television a lot, but it does happen to do that
is I sort of metaphor come up with, Here we are in a five ft square room,
five ft tall, five ft wide, five ft high, five, everything. And in front
of this one man sitting in that tiny room is a television and he is there
by himself and all through the building is more little cubicles, very much
with the same kind of people. It can also have a very private quality,
intends to turn us back into single people again, a runner runs really by
himself, although he may do so in a marathon. What I, what I miss, maybe
it's very old fashioned of me is the great communal experiences I remember
as a musician, the moments where I was there in an audience or there is a
musician dealing with a large number of people where we could find a
certain kind of commonality among us as people. I feel this is an
important kind of thing. How can we do this? Still dealing with the
explanations of our our perception that the television can bring, we can
juxtapose now, we can make terrific jumps, we can be elliptical the way
that we couldn't be with the older art, and I still think that it is
possible to do without having to deal with being old fashioned about it. I
don't have to tell the story in the complete way, might have Once I do, we
keep talking about media as if it were only television. I think we can be
very free to regard the various arts as media and to look at what's
happening there. And I think one of the things television has done and all
the discussion of television is, has gotten us to regard many, many things
as media as uh, conduits from one point to another point that we never
would have before, and certain things are happening. People have begun to
be interested in and to demand some kind of ideal, some kind of sense of
purpose from art, from architecture, from writing. There's a man I wanted
to read a few quotes who just wrote a book on fiction called john Gardner.
He's a reasonably well known novelist and he's come out very strongly
against the fiction that's been written essentially Post war in America is
being formalistic as being self indulgent. Um
and and he makes some claims for what are specifically novels, but any
kind of art has to be as a media, which I think one is beginning to see in
architecture as well and therefore interesting. He says it reasonably well.
All those criticisms of other novelists may be self serving, but I wanted
to read a couple of art is essentially,
I don't know if I can complete it. Art is essentially serious and
beneficial. A game played against chaos and death. Art builds temporary
walls against life's leveling force the ruin of what is splendidly
unnatural in us consciousness. A good book is one that for its time is
wise saying and magical. One that clarifies life intends to improve it to
art treats ideals, affirming and clarifying the good, the true and the
beautiful true art establishes models of human action cast net towards the
future carefully. Judges are right and wrong directions, celebrates and
mourns, it does not rant. It does not sneer or giggle in the face of death.
It invents prayers and weapons. It designs visions worth trying to make,
fact. It does not whimper or cower or throw up its hands and bad. It's
lashes. I think these are claims for the media of novels that wouldn't
have been made 15 years ago and I think the same kind of thing we're
seeing in architecture. We're talking about architecture that has meaning
that puts forth social ideals, that puts forth political ideals, that
enlarges the human being frank Gehry's work in Los Angeles. The Ron Davis
House is probably the best known plays with one's perception, so as to
make one much more aware of what one is looking at and how your eyes work
and what kinds of things we understand and that's just the barest level.
Um, jenks in an architecture ever compete with television to do what
you're saying. It's impossible. It doesn't have the range of colors that
doesn't have. I mean, once in a while, an architect may do something, I
don't see why we need to think in militaristic terms of competition.
I don't need it. All I really want to do is to find out what we're, what's
happening to us in the process of what these wonderful things we've
invented, uh, what they do, what they're doing to us, what we can do. Then
wait a second. You portrayed the person watching television is this
passive person in front of this box all by all by himself. Actually, this
person watching television is joined by about 25 million other people at
the same time, which is a rarity in history anyway. To begin with, he's
not really by himself on one level, but the main point I want to make
right now is that the fact is the person who sits and watches television
passively is the person that will go through life and do everything
passively. Whether he's in school, whether he's in church, whether, I mean
, a passive person will be passive, no matter what, in what environment he
is in. And that I think there are a lot of people who watch television. I
mean, like I do, and I mean, I'm not against passivity, I'm I'm not making
any value judgments, I just want to know what it is, it's happening to us
. I mean, I don't want to deal with it in that kind of way in saying that
this is wrong, this is right. The ultimate horror would be that we would
become sort of cut off that even if they're 25 million people watching the
same television show and we're all by ourselves doing it. We are still by
ourselves and the whole situation of us with other human beings in
proximity, which is a very natural state for human beings to be in. It's
maybe even that's debatable. I wanted to interrupt for one second
throughout a real big five letter word. Um, truth. And uh there was
something before in the theological stuff where they were talking about
understanding the past. And someone even suggested understanding the
present as being an important thing to get us to the future. Uh to me
understanding the uh spend a little time trying to understand the past.
And I don't know if I totally understand it, but I've spent a lot of time
very recently in the last 10 years. I'm trying to understand the present.
Um one of the things that Louis Kahn once said um was L. A. Is truth
whether you like it or not. And I went around for a few years trying to
figure out what he meant by that. Um I got a little help from woman who
used to be associated with him in some ways. And he said that louis Kahn's
definition of truth was that people are truth. And uh I imagined after a
while that that what he meant by L. A. Is being truth is that um is that L.
A. Is a kind of an environment, a city where people can express
themselves individually. They can drive any color car. They want any where
any color clothes, they can live in any color house they want. I mean and
it's not just colors. I mean whatever their style or whatever it is they
can they can do it. So it's kind of the truth sort of hangs out. It looks
a little crazy, Looks a little eclectic uh in some ways. You know, you
have to say that I'm wearing this shirt as a joke that almost abc is truth
because more millions and millions and millions and millions of people are
watching abc than than the other things. And there's a kind of, I think
what I feel that I have to deal with is that sudden the sudden recognition
that you know, maybe people are truth and if they like the what happy days
, the Virgin Shirley and what's the third big one? Uh you know, uh there's
something, there's gotta be something there. I mean you can't just say,
okay that's dumb stuff and people are dumb and forget about it. I mean,
someone has to really understand what is that phenomenon and what is
bringing people together? And I think we agree with that. I mean, I mean I
haven't automatically made a value judgment nor do I think a lot of other
people or or a city where where like like L. A. Is like television. I mean
where people are, you know, they're they're really doing what they really
want to do uh as architects or musicians, How do we help or help these
people grow and where they're living in L. A. Or how do we help them watch
television? But I think that for me, I mean that's a given L. A. Is a
given and television is a given and you know, I don't think of either one
as being particularly good or bad when it comes to true that doesn't come
to good or bad, it's just true, it's what is, you know, and uh you know, I
think there I think that what is the problem and that's dealing with what
is the secret to integrating at all and no one's really begun to deal with
what is and that's I think the basic point, I don't think that we're in a
good in any terrible disagreement about that. I mean, I don't think it's
automatically right, for example, to assume that uh that commercial
television and what might be considered its worst quote unquote
manifestations is any worse, so to speak than uh public tv. I fact
actually I have more of a brief against the public tv than I have the
other. For the obvious reason, I feel that I think was made a terrific
mistake about the nature of television. And also I think tends to have at
least in my experiences that I've had it. I mean I've had quite a bit of
work with public tv is that uh it tends to, you know, this allows some of
the basic nature of the medium, such as the need that we all have when
we're on in our own home to take breaks, to move around to take care of
other kind of things, even to move our bodies if you're sitting in a room
with a group of other people and you are in the throes of the say
something like the ST Matthew passion and you're sitting there for four
hours, you may want to go to the bathroom, but you forget about it because
you're obviously in some of the kind of thing, one of the things that hold
you there and as strong as it does is the presence of thousands of other
people around you and they are feeling something of the same kind of
things you are, there are also the hundreds of people up on stage helping
the whole thing happened and the overall incredibly moving experience that
this can become and when this has denied us for too long a time, there is
a very strong uh and important and in violent part of the human being,
which is, which is being ignored and being atrophied and I don't lament it
necessarily because I don't think we can go back to the ST Matthew passion
, I think we've become another kind of person, but I do know we're able to
sustain a long kind of thing. People go to football games and just as long
as the ST Matthew passion, there's no problem with that, they seem to stay
with that. But what I'm saying is that what I need and I think we all need
is a sense of greater flexibility in all of the different things and that
comes from understanding which each one of these media are, I think you're
right in saying that each one of them is a medium that we have a concert
medium, a rock concert medium, the classical concert medium, we have
medium of going to a gallery and watching what painters are doing with the
medium of going into a house and seeing what's been done there, all these
different media. And what what can happen is that the problem with
television is that for a very large number of people there has been a
tendency, I think, to be only able to understand the world around them in
terms of the very fragmented nature of that medium.
I don't have much else to say about this.
He said, I want to say that I'm very jealous of the fact that you're a
musician somehow. Music is the one art that somehow works can work
anywhere anytime. It can fit in anywhere anytime. But, you know, like,
let's say, an artist who does a painting or sculpture or something, I mean
, it's a tremendous amount of problem for him to put that anywhere. And
somehow music so easily fits everywhere anytime any age, any, you know,
it's sort of this really special medium that somehow has always worked and
will always work and it will always be loved. It means more almost than
any other medium. You know, there's something very special about music.
How does it stand? I mean, it comes up sometimes you must know what I'm
talking about a little bit and it's there's something so special about
music that none of the other arts have ever gotten to that point. Is it
impossible? It's just music? I mean, that man is certainly through music
has hit as high as, you know, creative, you know, levels and most, I mean
, I think
Beethoven sport says all right, it's it's very clear in art and
architecture and literature and film, which I pay most attention to the
kinds of new demands about what we want. The reaction against abstraction
or abstraction in its own as anything but a tool as an end. Is there some
parallel development in music? Does that make any sense in musical terms?
The reaction against what became a sort of a very strong, abstract
ification of our own medium? Yes, there has been in fact, it's very
similar in a lot of ways. I think this comes from the fact that uh I
suppose you could say the same certainly is true. And the biggest
revolutionary changes in architecture and in music and in painting, we're
all just about 1910, 15, 20. Right? I mean, there was a certain kind of
period in there. Yeah. But you know, and you know, that, you know, and
before the First World War and after it, to and around that time, That was
where there was a terrific need, I think, to break down a lot of other the
norms of society, we couldn't continue with the 19th century concept, as
David has pointed out. So there was a need to try to deal with all kinds
of fragmentation. Most of it was very analytical, I think in certain ways
it was beginning to look at different things which we had only considered
as part of a bigger picture. And somehow re if either looking to them as
as as separate elements to be understood in other ways than one. And
certainly this happened with music, we began to want to deal with in that
particular language, tonality, which is to say key centers. That was a
very determinist thing, particularly uh in the day of Mozart, where
everybody knows exactly where the key is, when you've been away from it,
when you're coming back to it. Mother have come back to you at the end of
the piece. You know, you always do finish the piece the same key, you
started it. There's a structure that's built on that whole kind of key
plan, there is a whole sense of gravity involved, which is something that
is absolutely perceptible to any western ears. Even in the eastern music,
there is also certain scale tones which are considered home and there is,
in other words, a sense of home and away. And this was of course very
essential to the whole basic musical thing. Um and there was a need to
think around that particular time to break all this down to say what
should we do about deciding each one of these key centers could be
considered equally. The whole uh effort by Arnold Schoenberg was not to
destroy tonality, but to unify all 12 possible tonalities into an area in
which there were no no home, that they were all home, but there was no
sense of gravity, there was no sense of away and home, that it was all
really home all the time and that really understanding here of this
particular uh idiom would be immediately to the point where you're talking
about uh you know, perceiving patterns particularly well, patterns was
really where our ears began to concept, We didn't know we began to deal
with and there was a kind of a surface level of basic kind of things. And
this of course, is what happened to us and eventually out of this, if it
began to look at the pattern hard enough, you might be able to extrapolate
the whole little title thing. Whereas a classical music here, one that was
built in the 19th century or the late 18th century would be first
articulating the structure and the parts of the structure inside of that
structure. This is interesting what you say, why is it that music is the
only art where people can just let the patterns come in not make judgments
with every note every little bit when it comes to a visual thing, there,
every little thing is a judgment or something, because actually you just
sit back and you can let it come in and I think you're talking about
yourself, I think as a musician, I look I listen to music in quite a
different way I listened to uh I'm sure you're much more visual person and
uh and I'm sure that you look at visual things more structurally perhaps
than I do. But I've looked at music structurally because of my training,
because my orientation, because I think in the language of music and
eventually anyone who creates creates in it does think in these overall
structures. Doesn't think I'm purely on a single moment of what I can do
between this measure and that measure. I just I listen to where the
drummers out there who was able to place against a four beat, three beat
in an eight beat in the free beat against that. And then of course,
structurally interesting on a momentary basis. Now, the next interesting
part is what makes him a good musician as he was able to structure the
whole soul from beginning to the end. So that the idea continued to have
extra ramifications. You began variant, he began to have a go to a kind of
a strong upward building kind of shape. And these are the things that
there was given more than just that moment. If we're just the pattern of
the four versus against the three against the eight against the free
pattern, it would soon loses interest. It's got to have some sort of out
overall kind of shape, before it becomes coherent along kind of sense. So
, in the process, you're asking about the abstractions that happened to us
? Well, these I think a lot of it came from at least in the case of music
from the various wars this morning. Mhm. Several people mentioned, I think
it was Bill Thompson was talking about Wagner as one of the, you know,
kind of the ultimate example of the overwhelmingly proud artist. The one
who was so in love with this medium was so able to to create an
overwhelming kind of masterpiece in it, that you could be swept away in it.
And we saw a case of the whole country which is metaphorically, became
sort of going down in the voluntary and get your game room having built
almost its own structure on the same kind of pride in the same kind of
thing I'm talking about the third Reich of course, but um this is of
course in europe had cataclysmic effects. Both wars asked of the people
actually in the way to war the old culture against the new culture, the
older attitudes against what was clearly happening and these of course,
happened to be terrible cataclysms in both cases. So, the need after each
war would be to start to break new ground. The one difference between
probably what happened in architecture and art on one hand, and what
happened in music? on the other hand now of course they're exceptions
Picasso is that after the war after all of the really mind boggling wild
things that happened in the team's. I'm talking to the rite of spring in
1913 the you know Pierrot lunaire, all of the new ways of looking at music.
Now we find Ives Fourth Symphony which was written all of these works
before the First World War, before the Great cataclysms After the war
there was a terrific the First World War and I'm talking about a terrific
return toward neoclassicism. I need to re articulate the forms of the past
and need to go back to a Baroque era. Need to try to sound like bach or
like Mozart. I need to try to find a simple straight kind of thing which
is I think is different in that way from what had happened to you. I was
just wondering whether with half an hour left we wanted to open up the
discussion to the audience. I'd love to see that. Have you things to say
please. I'm tired of talking
little hard with this drum solo going on.
No awards or a question questions anything. Yes. Mhm. Don't you come up
here? I'm sorry to make you get up. But I mean as always right I just
would like to know how you feel about media being.
Well I tend to agree with you that most of the T. V. Is sort of wasted And
I'd like to see if people are getting to the point where they're starting
to feel like the environment that tv needs to be cleaned up and I'll use
more productively and being cleaned up. Well I like it when it's dirty and
messy and all over the place. I love that messiness. But no I think what I
want to see is a greater extending robbers win. Is this what you like it
when the robbers win? I don't care about the robbers and the cups. I mean
I would like to see other things on tv. Then then then then then the
unimaginative myths of a lot of it. And I see the same thing happening in
in in uh you know people talk about the violence and tv. Well and of
course there's violence in the movies last night I saw before I saw carry
on tv that's about a violent as in the movie I don't ever want to see I
don't think I don't see another all that blood and gore all over the floor.
Well I think it's a lack of imagination probably because I have to fill
the media. It's a voracious animal. You have to get on that darn thing 24
hours a day, seven days a week. They have to keep thinking of something
they all seem to come to that. Why?
Yeah I'm less interested in other words on the effect on the on the
audience. I think the audience gets quickly inured to violence. What I'm
interested in is in the practicing artists and tv people and nothing like
that. We're making all of that violence. So, well, I'm talking more about
,
I'm talking in fact that, you know, like artists don't have any control.
It's basically,
you know, the advertising agencies and all the money that
pays for the
the commercials. What do they want it?
I'm sorry. I didn't catch that. What do you want? Why do they want that?
That's a possible corruption. That's fine. I want to hear that.
What is it you said? Well, I'm saying,
Yeah.
Mhm.
Okay.
Yeah, it sounds like the wind up to me. It was what I'm saying is uh,
whether, you know, they were, there ought to be some kind of a concerted
effort by people too do something more creative with television rather
than just leaving it, like in the private domain. I'm saying, uh, is that
potential for using it much more creatively as far as I'm concerned? I
think it's right now, it's it's evolving to the point where, you know,
it's like the environment is going to be run down to the point where
people are just gonna have to take it over. But I'm saying why why do we
have to wait until the environment it's destroyed before you start doing
something about it. I think one of the myths we have is the idea of an art
form which serves some vague public interest as opposed to an art form
which serves some monetary or political or religious interest. And I don't
think you can really find any moment in history where artists in fact had
any kind of control over what was being done. And I think that's something
we pretend happened that we need to get back to. But even when they are
successful, like for instance in music, the Beatles were so successful in
controlling the whole world in a way and changing the whole world. I mean
their music was, but I don't think they really did have control in other
words, the artist himself. I mean maybe they had to do with marketing
success. Well they also have no, no, no. I think I think the interesting
thing, I think the interesting talent you know, which helped. I think the
interesting thing is on the way over here, I heard someone introducing
this music thing over there and saying that the drum and the music was
man's first expression. And you know, and I think that there's a very
important thing happened in music which does make it so much more heavier
than than a lot of the other arts. And there's uh an unmistakable rhythm
to music. And I think that there's that that kind of a rhythm and that
rhythm can even sometimes come over on television set no matter what's on
tv but that rhythm can start happening, it affects you. and and that and
it's it's how does architecture get that rhythm, you know, make people
feel that kind of basic rhythm that they want to be part of. And I think,
you know, it comes down to rhythm in a way. And how does how do the arts
relate to rhythm? And I think, I think maybe they don't, and that's maybe
one of the problems that and man needs rhythm in a way. That's what I'm
saying.
Well, rhythm isn't all there is to music.
There are other things that are in music to basically it's some kind of
organization of sound are all different kinds of for curtain, you know, if
somebody is out playing a flute out by himself without a drum behind it is
also music when you're whistling to yourself, salsa music. There were also
uh in the after the Second World War where there was a need again talking
about the the whole need to say goodbye to a whole part of european
culture which has brought them to this terrible, terrible moment. There
was a need at that particular point to destroy at least try to reinvent
every one of the various aspects of music which became named parameters.
I'm talking about the movement that was headed by people like Pierre
boulez Karlheinz Stockhausen and others where the whole basic kind of
rhythmically predictable kind of set, which had been so much part of music
up to that particular time was also called in question. So all of a sudden
there were as needs of trying to organize lengths of notes into all kinds
of uh outwardly, you know, unwritten all kinds of ways. There were needs
of dealing with different kinds of sounds in some kind of a free and kind
of way to get away from the old, predictable kind of impulse is what
you're talking about about the rhythm is you're talking about the rhythm
that's been prevalent in popular music? No, no, I'm not talking about beat
, I'm not talking about, I'm talking about rhythm for instance, in the
film, close encounters, there's a kind of a sound actually, the sound is
totally stolen from the getty's atmospheres. And it's just one note that
goes on for three minutes and they use a piece of that note. And I'm not
talking about a beat. I'm talking about a rhythm, no matter if the note is
four minutes long, I'm not talking about you're talking about rhythm,
you're talking about events that you're talking about, a different kind of
thing. You're talking about. Event followed by event by event. Now, of
course, we've immediately, I mean, the one legacy of that whole particular
period which lasted about maybe 15 or 20 years of what you call post war
music more prominently in europe than it was here was the legacy of long
held notes, The kind of sound that you're talking about in close
encounters or you could find it also. And those other things of course, do
you hear it through, you know Los Angeles ears. But when I hear a thing
like that, I keep thinking of the source and I can't help because
naturally I heard that again when it came out and it was a different kind
of thing for me I heard of it is in a different kind of thing. I heard of
it as musical events, an entirely different kind of way. I don't think of
it as something that automatically means to be space. It has it has taken
on that meaning through Hollywood.
Uh
Right.
Mhm.
Yeah. Yeah.
All right. Mark.
Mhm.
Fight.
I think it's highly like that. I think video and that sort of thing lends
itself to that. Again. I don't think music and architecture have to
compete. I think you've made a very good case for architecture. I think
music, what do they call architecture frozen music. I always wanted to
know that I don't, I don't think I like frozen music melted architecture.
Some of us call music melted architecture. Take another point of view on
this. The architecture is what music, what they like. My music exactly
what you're talking about in terms of the structure and the rhythm made
into a permanent form. Architecture is supposed to have that architecture
always did until and some say it has to do with the philosophy of
architecture. It more specifically has to do with the percentage of money
of a society that goes into building. Some basic things happen. And we're
getting very nitty gritty here for a moment, but some basic things
happened in architecture at some point. People started to pay workers a
livable wage. This is an absolute disaster for architecture was much
better for the workers music too. Um, not as crucial proportion perhaps or
perhaps there is federal money and that sort of thing. It's a musician
unions. There's much of a problem of integrating music into our culture. I
can tell you this is true, but I think the real destruction of the large
ensembles, the things where they had, the orchestra is a very great uh,
you know, large numbers of orchestra of the First World War. The real age
of the great Orchestra was before the First World War. The war simply
killed off most of the reason why the kind of money you're talking about
construction, it's even higher. And construction does not get private
money given as a donation and the ball given to support the local building
and the rest of that like the Lyrica. There's a lot of situations which
are different in any case what is then available proportion of money
available to go into things which are complicated, which is what you're
talking about architecture, which is complicated, which has a funny little
decorations and which has brakes, which has different materials, which is
all the things that you call rhythm um became out of the question at the
same time, there are certain philosophies that made abstraction, a good
idea that considered color and all this sort of thing necessary for the
masses. But certainly the elite didn't need this sort of thing.
Rationality is what was required. What's interesting now is that
architecture has begun to get quite a bit interested in these things in
detail, in the sense of human invention, the sense of experience as you
move through a building, smaller scale things, things which break up the
experiences you go through. But the money still isn't there and which
you're getting some very interesting compromises which which begin to look
ticky tacky a lot of the time because the situation is built in and it was
not simply a question of philosophy ever. It's quite a bit off your point
, but on the way it's sort of related. I mean, what we're talking about,
for example, on the street in europe, if you see one bauhaus building
among uh 10 or 12 other ones that were built around the corner by the
belly part time when there's lots of this is very noticeable. Embarrass.
For example, one or two buildings that are very modern Over capacity right
next to things that were built in 1905, we have a very marvelous and
natural and very shocking effect. But when you have a whole street like
Park Avenue all built director Lin early with lots and lots of great
glasses. It is another feeling entirely. I think what happened with art
music and I'm talking about art music mostly because that's what my
interest was for many years, purely almost. Um we had an area in there
where the very effects, I talked about the long held notes, the things
that you found so spacey and close encounters, the things that are, you
know, we're a whole bunch of it was a whole language is hardly ever. I
never really got to us here, that hardly penetrated in a lot of ways that
it did at one time in europe. I'm talking about boulez Stockhausen Berio,
all these are people who were very close involved at one particular time
with the kind of sound that was really supposed to say goodbye to all of
the music of the past. An effort to try to start all over from scratch.
Stockhausen described the Germany of after the war is a very exhilarating
time. Because all of the cities which had any kind of memory of the Nazi
time, early years before that were flattened there for you to start from
scratch. You were forced to start from scratch. This is very exciting to
it's very exciting to me. There was a sense of building now, of course,
what has happened is they've built and now they're dealing with the world
that they have been built and the building is no longer uh, as simple as I
mean, you're dealing with the kind of stagnation there as so often happens
elsewhere in our Western society because of the fact we end up with all
these brand new cities. I remember when I used to work at the german
theaters and I was doing a lot of stage music in towns like don't move a
little S and Diesel Dawson like that. And I remember at times I would wake
up in the hotel, we're looking outside, I would see the cow for the Kafala
and I couldn't, I couldn't really remember for several minutes which town
I was in. They were all so much alike because they'd all been built about
the same kind of time. Well, we did end up in the words of the kind of a
sort of an overall abstraction in our musical medium and art music, which
made it all sound very much alike. It was kind of an international style
which sort of took over at that particular point. What has happened
recently, which in a way is parallel to what happened to architecture has
been a greater intense interest in some of the effects of localization,
popularization even certainly things I've in the last 10 years been
fascinated by old historical point of view towards popular music into some
sort of attempt to try to build an american musical language, which is
based on some of the very simplest choices. Whether a note goes up here
goes down there are things that are built almost because of uh the great
songwriters or the great jasmine great rag timers. These are people who to
you know, have somehow got a great deal to do with basic steps. The 1-1
choices between note to note or pitch to pitch or sound to sound which are
so much part of American language. So I needed to go into that and to find
my own particular ability to accept the roots I had as a musician, a lot
of this whole particular time was a sort of uh internationalization is
sort of a need to to to to deny any of the sort of what you might call uh
more local types of acculturation in our lives. Our american culture is a
very universal culture already. But they were already when they were
choosing those first notes are great songwriters and and jasmine and rag
timers and other people. They were already making very basic choices which
is which affect ours and have a great deal of do what we do on the
simplest kind of level. And I think many composers now and the musicians
are looking really at these basic choices. There's something very
important because they have a great deal to do with who we are, what we
are. We can't deny them, we can't say they're not there. We can't become
internationalists. I could never be a very good boulez or burial or
Stockhausen because I was born here, I didn't go through the same
holocaust. They did. I didn't go through the need to destroy the culture
that they might have had. I didn't go through the same kind of thing. And
because of this I may be more interested because there's no there's never
been any of those great big systems in my life as the roar would cause
That may be in a way we have the freedom to be able to put together a
culture back from the past to the present. Perhaps Europe can't do right
now. I see for example, in art music in Europe right now I'd rather dead
end such a situation. They are still dealing with some of the problems
that are inherent in the language they discovered in the 1950s. I need to
stay away from rhythms. I need to stay away from any kind of recognizable
musical fragments. To the point now that uh, that that also has begun to
turn around in tiny circles and it begins to sound very much all the same.
So here we are with a with a kind of a history. We're all immigrants were
all americans because we came here through one or another means either we
were brought here in chains and we were not. We still all came here and
that broke something from europe. But we have made our own kind of
continuity. So in a way we are carrying on another kind of longer
tradition of music. Music is a growing language. Music is a language like
language it contains in it, old old old sounds, old words, old meanings
and it contains things that I have to be invited next last week because of
need and all of these things are part of it and a whole spectrum of
language, this is I'm talking myself and what I want is to be able to use
the entire musical language in some very cohesive and coherent kind of way
involving both the past and the present. There was the same language as I
understand it in the same way as I speak. In fact I hope better than I
speak
other questions, questions, comments.
Mhm. Listen, we're gonna ask questions. We're gonna we're gonna have a
test here if there's no question yes, go right into the test period. I'm
surprised for people who thought the seminar should have been on something
else. Yes. Mhm.
This
yeah,
you know, I think
great.
Mhm Yeah. Yes
the television is our drum. It's our it's our culture's drum. I mean just
like it was millions of years ago. It's just our drum,
present day or yes, just a culture.
Yes, yeah. Uh huh.
This kind
louder please. I'm sorry.
Mhm
Yeah,
cable tv and
there's also a resurgence of interest in short films and animation. Any
number of also two more directly answer your question. I have been
involved for some years now in the use of video to understand the
environment and understand how the ecology is getting ripped off. And they
have some very recent technological developments that allow for instance,
time lapse video and where we've spent days and weeks and months looking
at plazas and things in, in different, uh, uh, increment in the time,
which was a very important thing he said at the beginning time has a very
important part of understanding. And we're so, uh, in the quote real world
as we go through our day. We are so, uh,
you know, we have our blinders are our perception of chronological time
and we can't pop out of that. We can't see it. We can't, you know, go, You
know, a mile up in the air and look down a video camera and go up there
and look down for us and it can show us ourselves at different time
increments. I mean, for instance, if you look at a plaza 160th normal time
, uh, you will get a whole different people will look like ants on one
level. You change the time and feedback over and then mike, uh,
he's the only feedback uh huh, which is something we, I guess we
especially must come from media. Uh, one of the interesting things that uh
, that marshall McLuhan says, and it's, it's the first thing we learned
from media is feedback, which we're getting right now and it can teach us
some things. But what he suggests is that feedback is too slow, like
concepts and it's already outdated and what we have to start doing is feed
forward and that's that's how we're gonna get to the future is by feed
forward. And and what does that mean? What does feedback? Uh Well, instead
of you know, bouncing off only the past, you know, you you you after
you've done enough pattern recognitions and gone under a certain level,
then you can start bouncing off the future, you know, sort of feeding
forward, doing doing injections. Well do doing you know, experiments for
instance and stuff like that. Uh experimental in other words,
experimenting in the future and bouncing off the future rather than
bouncing off the past. And uh media has gotten us to that point. Well, it
first taught us about feedback and now it's gonna I think hopefully it can
possibly get us to start feed forwarding and it sounds absolutely
wonderful but I have a certain amount of trouble understanding it in any
clear sort of sense. I think we've we have a wonderful, we have a
wonderful language we have developed in our century to to make us feel
sort of excited about what we're doing and notice that it gets more and
more polysyllabic as time goes on. I mean really all I know about the
future is what I'm seeing right here. This is now. It has been built some
of it already is being built, there will be more of it. But if this is the
shape of the future, it's not so much interestingly, but the fact that I'm
seeing it right here and now he is interesting. It is obviously an effort
, you know, this whole place to look at the whole thing and it was a
record right here. This is you see that's where I have, I have semantics
but semantics, trouble feedback. Okay, explain one thing. Uh Marshall
McLuhan and his book understanding media and some other books dealt with
understanding the media and there were things that we learned from the
media, things that we didn't think were uh as important as other things
that ended up being very important what he's going on to in the last few
years. His latest book is called the city's classroom. And essentially he
now looks at the contemporary american city L. A. Or cities like that as a
medium. And he is now writing about the cities in a way like he wrote
about the TVs and you begin to see other things are more important in the
cities of today than we thought, just like things on television, things
that were happening were more important than what we had suspected. And it
isn't always just the content, it is the media. And so in a sense, uh you
know with the city to it always in just the contact it is that cities sort
of, it's as a media and and how it functions that way in the perception of
it and uh um, and then it gets you and at a point when you begin to
understand the city as a medium and understand, I mean if you can
understand television without getting hung up with the particular good and
bad values of a particular thing, but really understand that medium and
you do the same thing with the city, then you get on to the next level and
you can begin to anticipate what should happen, what directions it should
come. When you can begin to anticipate, you can begin to somehow orient
yourself to go in those directions. And so in a sense the media has taught
us a lot in other words, you can take what the media has taught us through
people that have understood it like marshall McLuhan and you can apply
that to the environment or anything and and so it has helped us in that
sense. I mean the media has helped us incredibly understand ourselves and
I mean all you have to do is have someone point a video camera at you and
you start talking and you look at the playback and you're gonna learn
about yourself and what the only problem is that the people that run the
tv stations don't point the cameras at us more often or everything. I just
let it, you know and just look at it that way.
Seven
no yeah
receive
set,
I don't think even pretending that that's life. It's just those are a
little little, little theater. They're not really pretending that is
really like for the most part, I mean, there's no popular television
series that pretends this is life. I mean, there, there no a friend about
that inevitably there is a certain amount of inadvertent editorial ization.
We can't help but influence what we want to see behind, uh, you know,
well behind the camera or behind anything or even when I'm listening as a
musician to music around me as it's going to somehow show up in my own
particular music is bound to be editorialized to a certain extent. That's
natural. There's no shame in that. I suppose what you're feeling is that
the people who are most in control of the time on tv or rather shallow
perhaps and maybe not really thinking very deeply about what all this may
be really doing to all of us and perhaps it's not really their place to do.
So that's the other question. But still, can you imagine having yet,
haven't gotten any political justice personally as a human being after the
war in Vietnam after Nixon and all that stuff without the television of
media bringing it to you every day for like four months. I mean that thing
that the Watergate thing, I mean that it was a kind of in, on one level,
it's just, it was political justice and only through a medium like that
could we have gotten it and every day over and over again and the
television is a medium that can do that and no other medium can do that.
Give you that kind of justice on one level gave me that kind of just but
of course it is of course tv justice we have to remember that. I thought
it was good. I like that. I just, well I mean I mean I don't mind it
either but it's rather like the guy gets is at the end of the hour show to
you know we had to have somebody at the end before the commercial comes
and uh it might not have been so cut and dried in a situation where the
whole thing was dealt with in a little bit more of a less cut and dried
kind of way. I mean I don't think that I liked particularly the man who
lived the presidency but and I don't think he was particularly ill served
by the situation but after all I think he was dealt like a baddie at the
end of uh at the end of the T. V. Show. I really do
that I think has happened to us. I think we tend to go very simply that
way. And I suppose in a way it's a little bit like public hangings. I mean
media or media may be one of the media in the past was was a public
hanging. They were a big offense They used to uh, they used to have
wonderful, you know, and the church suppers afterwards and you had to buy
tickets to see the guy get is and all kinds of things are also, you know,
a kind of show, what the basic thing about it though is that we're talking
about what media is or any of these things is the, somebody initiates it
and somebody is watching or somebody is listening, paul sills, who is the
founder really of Second City and who was a man I've worked with many
years over the long, long time and a very intelligent guy says theater,
somebody performing and somebody watching. And this was basically an
answer of
question which was very prevalent in the late fifties. And that is that
the real reason that theater seemed to be in such a trouble, it was a
little bit more abundantly, you know, according to many people in the
small audiences and so on was because we were basically still dealing with
a proscenium stage that we really had to start thinking about, you know,
thrust stages theater in the round street theater, what have you and the
media that the area in which the theater was happening would have such an
effect that this was somewhat revitalized theater. So we accordingly built
an awful lot of new theaters with uh, you know, theater around theaters
and thrust stages and theaters hanging from the ceiling and so and so
forth. And theater still had the same basic problem because it had somehow
lost that equation of theater being somebody performing and somebody
watching in the same kind of way that speaking is using your lips tongue,
mouth breath and so on. What you're talking about a very basic function.
And if you keep this line, it doesn't make a heck of a lot of difference
whether you're playing what you're playing on a proscenium stage or or
hanging by your thumbs, uh someplace off the flagpole, it depends
basically that you have somebody performing and somebody watching, you
have the initiator and you have the person who is receiving it. It's
basically holding the floor for the time being in the same way I'm holding
the floor probably for far too long here in front of you, where you're
sitting there basically listening. And the point about having a lot of
time when you've taken off a chunk of time and ask people to concentrate
on that chunk of time is that you're hoping that in that process some of
the changes that don't happen when it's just a quick conversation, I say
two words you say towards might happen because I've asked you to have a
larger parcel of time to concentrate on what I have to say. There are
things that must be done and said and unrolled that take that kind of
concentration and that kind of time and that kind of bearing with one and
if that if that equation of somebody performing and somebody watching or
somebody doing something to somebody listening, if that has kept strong,
it doesn't matter really what the medium is and what I'm saying now is if
this is so and I feel it really is, it doesn't sound like something to be
questioned, but I mean it could very easily be you see people talking
about audience participation while you do participate, you participate by
listening. There are also lots of different ways of how this is done. If
you're in a black church, you respond by responding after the things that
are there, if you're a political meeting and do the same thing by clapping.
These are all different equations as an audience and initiator because
they are very much determined by the place and the time this place is
going to change a lot of those perceptions because we're dealing with a
physically different kind of place to operate still. However, we're
dealing with something which is just as ancient as time and that is you
out there me up front and that of course won't change for quite a while.
Speaking of time, we're getting to the end. I think we should ask for the
last question, there is one
and if not, I think we should make you want to make a one sentence last
statement that I won't be happy until William Shakespeare's prophecy, that
the whole world is a stage actually happens
Okay. I think one should say that Subpoena and Richard saw woman will be
presumably on the panel tomorrow. They weren't able to make it yet today.
And that will take place here at 3:00 and continuation of this panel at
whatever subjects takes up. Thank you for coming. Uh huh.
Uh huh.
Very pompous as panelists up here saying all these incredible things. What
we are scheduled to talk about is arcosanti, Critical Mass. And it's a
kind of esoteric title to put on any sort of panel discussion. So I felt
that perhaps what we should do as a starting point is maybe explain what
that means in terms of artist Sandy and that of course comes from nuclear
physics, physics and it basically describes a phenomenon that requires two
things. It requires
particles with a certain all right kind of quality about them. In this
case it means they have to be radioactive. It also as well as
qualitatively it describes the quantity. A certain number of interactions
cannot happen unless that critical mass is available in a certain quantity.
And we can use that term critical mass as a metaphor for some of the the
human civilizations communities, cities that we have um when the critical
mass in any community is very low, that is that the density of it is very
low, then the number of interactions that tend to happen within that
community is very, very small. Um if you can imagine an agrarian society
with all the members of that society spread out maybe half a mile apart,
Information throughout that community tends to travel very slowly. Um Once
you start making a denser packing of a population than the information in
that more densely packed grouping flows much more freely. And that's what
that's what we're trying to do in terms of building our Kazanjian,
building our colleges generally is we're trying to to make a denser kind
of situation where information and ideas will flow in a much, much freer
way than they do in our existing environments.
Um one of the problems, of course, in dealing with that kind of metaphor
is that we're talking about quantity because generally when one talks
about critical mass, one deals in quantitative terms and we have to be
really aware that besides quantity, we have to deal with the element of
quality because if we just deal with quantity, we get back into the same
trap that the consumerist society has got us involved in where we deal
more with quantity than what the quality of the things that we buy uh
bring us. Um in a way, the festival through the intensity of the
interactions that go on through this weekend is a sort of mini version of
the critical mass by bringing together anarchist sanity, all the
performers, the speakers, the artists and a large number of the general
public were in fact creating a critical mass that brings about enormous
surge in the energy that surrounds Arcosanti. And what we're eventually
hoping to do is to make this on a more permanent basis. Um Mhm. What we uh
uh scheduled to do is to try and examine how this process can be begun at
Arcosanti and how we can continue to create this condition. What happens
now is the festival happens once a year and what we would like to have is
the same sort of energy is going on here on a more continuous basis.
Um My sense is that one of the ways that we can do this is that we have to
begin with basics and that means the basic reassessment of a of the values
that we as a society embrace because our values really a shape our
environments and then our environment shape us. And what I feel in order
to get this idea going and to make it take off is that we we must attempt
to make Arcosanti a focus point which will challenge the artists and the
performer and basically there's no greater challenge than to challenge
someone's values in someone's ethics and what we would like to do. I feel
that Arcosanti is to challenge the sort of ethics and the sort of values
that lead us into a the kind of society that deals in consumerism and
speculation and segregation and greed and so on. Um So I feel that if we
want to uh encourage the idea of this critical mass taking off and
beginning to uh to ferment some new ideas from arcosanti that we we have
to
boy, we have to send out the word to all those people that have a
commitment to quality in in our lives. Um and let people know that artist
, artist Sandy stands for a set of values that challenge um those kind of
values that we've become accustomed to in our modern society. And we'd
wish to challenge not only the artist, but you and and anybody who is
interested in changing those values to create with us a vision of the
world as it could be in the future. Because we are really now at a point
when we collectively are creating our own futures. We have the ability and
the and the um, the techniques to create our future, but perhaps what
we're lacking is the vision of what that future can become. So, I feel
that by challenging the artist uh in a very direct way, and in a very
basic way that we can really encourage uh, this explosion of energy at
Arcosanti that we call the critical mass effect. And we have here on the
panel several people who have responded to the challenge of Arcosanti by
coming out here and uh joining us on the panel and also doing some of the
artworks. And I'd like to throw open the discussion to them. I'm sure
everybody could introduce themselves if you feel you would like to tom
would you like like to stop. Sure, you can hear it right.
My name is Tom Van Sant. I'm a sculptor and painter. And recently five
years have become interested in kites and like eating peanuts, they just
couldn't stop. And so my role here, not only the pleasure of of being here
, but it's also to fly some large kites which will be doing over the
weekend.
This is my first visit to Arcosanti.
I arrived last night at about 6:30 when the shadows were very long and I
saw it from the, for the first time from the gas station there off the
highway.
It's a it's a magic place. Mhm. The people here feel as though they are
active in their own destiny, in this, in this environment.
And it occurs to me that the title for our discussion is critical mass.
That implies the gaining of power. When when a structure, a relationship
between forces
brings that relationship to a point that it can exercise power
and critical mass is not only
a time of kind of jubilation if if you are seeking power, but it's a time
of testing because that's where most ideas begin to fail. They begin to
die. As soon as they gain power, gain a following, gain resources, gain
respectability, uh gain all the things that they think they want.
And the founder of that institution or the originator of those ideas may
uh may disclaim the positions of the institution, but the institution
always seems to institutionalize those ideas and they seem to in one
respect,
begin to die upon upon maturity, upon receiving acknowledgement upon
gaining power.
Um I think that is something to be to be considered
um
by the residents of Arcosanti.
Can can fulfillment really destroy the dream or change it to where it's
not that kind of a dream anymore. To me right now, it is perfectly alive,
perfectly marvelous. The people here are coming because they enjoy it.
There's no um there's no prestige involved with participating or
exhibiting at Arcosanti is just at the right place for everything to
happen.
Um
So can tab hunter deal with success? Can arcosanti survive reaching
critical mass.
I had passed the question then on. Okay.
At the risk of perhaps saying nothing of substance at all, were determined
to make it spontaneous and not to write. Our responses are adults. My name
is Arthur stops and I designed Mhm architectural sculptures and I'm
building houses with friends in san Francisco area. And I myself, I'm
interested in perhaps becoming a more permanent part of Arcosanti. I had
to explore that. Maybe I had to explore myself in conjunction, but it does
seem as tom says a most wonderful place at this present time, but the
question is not how to deal with the problems of critical mass, but rather
how critical mass can be achieved and my personal questions how could I as
an artist slash builder relate to our arcosanti. Um, maybe the placing of
me on this panel somehow natural, although I'm not sure what I'm going to
say next to you there. Um, if artists such as myself or builders such as
myself wish to make themselves a permanent part of and contribute
contribution to arcosanti, what airport, what provision is made for that
as yet unclassified type.
Okay.
I think I'll just leave that as a question for a moment and perhaps other
speakers will respond to that.
Mm hmm. Yeah. Do you want to say
go ahead. Uh,
my name is ruth asawa linear and I am from san Francisco. I'm a sculptor
and as a student, I went to Black Mountain College
uh, which was an experiment in living and working building, um, building
buildings and uh working with artists. Ah, That idea began in 1933 and
lasted 17 years and when it ended, the idea was really over because the
commitment was over. And so I'm very interested in Arcosanti because I
feel that that I wanted to see what was happening here and what the
commitment is, what the plans are for. I mean for how many years and
whether that commitment can last uh, to finally realize what you really
want because you're in a period of of, of developing still. And and
somehow I don't know when that point of real success comes when things
begin to fall apart and
when I I spent three years at Black Mountain College uh in an isolated
community isolated from the native community. And,
and it was a very exciting time because reflecting on it to try to realize
what was really important about it was the people who were there. And I
think that that will determine how long arcosanti will remain effective.
Is is the people who make it up. It's not just the buildings, but it will
be the people who, who will be here to do the work. And I think what made
Black Mountain finally end was that
there were less workers than there were talkers. And I think that you have
to be very careful about about having a commitment to working and you
could have a lot of wonderful ideas. But if the people here are not
willing to do the the milking of the cows are harvesting or or the kitchen
work or mopping the floors, all of those things that don't change whether
in history, I mean there's no past or there's no future to that. I mean
it's always with us. And I think if you don't understand that, then this
place won't last.
My, I was so tired of living in the community after three years that I
decided that I would never live in the community again. But I decided that
the unit that I felt that I would like to experiment with was my own
family. So we had, we we have six Children. And I think out of that unit
is still, I feel, I feel having worked in the community, having worked in
the, in the city and finding that the most exciting unit is the family
unit because you can have those who work and those who don't work and
those who who pitch in, who don't pitch in. And if that if that mix, which
is why I think what critical mass means if that mix doesn't work, then the
whole thing will not run smoothly. And it's not that things should be easy
, but but every part of it has to be working. And that's why I felt that
that instead of trying to start another black mountain, which is what
everybody says, why don't you start another black mountain. Such a
wonderful period that I feel that it is too late to start another black
mountain because we talk about energy crisis and we talk about about
city's decaying and we find that people are leaving the city. So
enrollment in school is declining. We have surplus buildings that at this
point in the city we don't have to build new buildings. What we really
need to do is redefine the use of these buildings and make them work in a
different way for us. That's why I feel that the, the philosophy or the
idea of bringing competent people into a mix. We talk about public
education being so ineffective. It's because the mix is not right. And I
think the important thing that we need in public education because that at
this point is where the most money is spent in this country. I mean in
California we spend $8 billion half
of the state's budget goes into education. And yet we don't have an
effective program. So my feeling is that if we can we can fill our schools
and make that mix,
then something might happen. And if it doesn't happen then then hopefully
the family unit is still in operation because I feel that that
our Children don't have to have a recreation director, don't have to have
a community center to go to. They take we have one who loves sports and he
gathers all his friends and gets the six pack and they go to a public park
and they have a game, they have that every saturday so that this we don't
have to spend money on hiring counselors. And because they counsel
themselves and they have learned in a way to work and be responsible.
Although they like to play more than they like to work. I mean that's
what they say about us that that mom and dad Don't have to, I mean you can
work seven days a week, 20 hours a day. But us we me I'm going to play a
little and I'm going to work a little. So I think that they have the right
idea about the right mix and I think it depends on how big you want to get
and how you can make that that size and work for you and it's really what
you want to happen,
you just get one last point of view and then we can start okay I'll make
it short. Do you think we're, my name is kate Maxwell and I'm an artist in
a very personal day to day way and my specialty is psychotherapy. And the
thing that I find to be of critical importance is how to help people be
creative in a day to day. Since the people I see most of them have lost
their creativity and they've lost their sense of play.
And when an individual has done that then they need an environment that
will support them in learning to uh to let loose to be creative and they
need to confront their own inner, need to expand their limits to enjoy
themselves. Um Tom and I were playing earlier with words and one of the
words we were playing with was humor.
Um Tom brought up the fact that humor is uh is an old term that has two
meanings. one is that fluid that forms in an injured joint that is needed
to provide
um movement lubrication, you have to have lubrication in your life and
humor acts as a lubrication for us in any kind of an environment
environment such as arcosanti you have to have humor if you don't have
humor, you limit your sense of play and you limit your creativity.
So one of my interests in arcosanti is how do people play here? How do you
combine work and play? How are you creative in a day to day since there's
, you know, you're doing bits and pieces of a tremendous structure, which
is very exciting. How do you keep that in mind? How do you make it live
for yourselves and how do you keep alive your relationship so that their
creative and there's play in humor and and just day to day enjoyment. I
think this could be an extremely exciting community and it takes a certain
amount of awareness and work to keep um the goals in mind and to keep a
sense of humor and play and a creative way of dealing with everyday life.
We just one you seem to have several different questions may be rather
than answers. And I guess that's always the first part of trying to get
some solutions is to find out what the questions are. It seems like one of
the things we're talking about is not only how to generate a critical mass
, but is that success is going to be a danger to the community anarchy
Sandy and to the innovation that we get in this kind of environment. The
other question is, is the replace for the artist on a day to day basis
right now. And how can we fit those people into the present situation?
and the 4th thing seems to be that the work ethic, which I think we have
pretty well down at arc insanity right now. We have a, we have a T shirt
that says work hard, play hard tired, which sort of defines the
philosophical ideas behind, behind work here. Um, and the idea of uh, the
family unit as community. Um, I think what we're doing in arcosanti is in
fact restructuring the, the, the way that the community has put together,
but not necessarily restructuring the individual units of that community.
We're rearranging the communications between those various elements of
any community to make it easier for them to, to operate what we would also
like to do. I think in terms of education is to make the city the
education in itself. Many of our cities seem to forgo the option of using
all the resources that are available as educational resources and we would
like to do that here. And the other thing that you raised is very
difficult to define. There's a very bizarre sense of humor at artist Sandy.
Um, probably needs someone like yourself to try and define what it is,
But there is one here, but maybe if, uh, we would like to involve the
audience here, there's nothing more boring than sitting and listening to a
lot of people talk all the time, especially if you have a question that
you'd like to ask and maybe you would like to lead off. Sure.
Uh well, Well 100 ducks is kind of bizarre human. We've been offered 100
ducks from a from a community down in to someone of the developments down
there. They no alive, alive and well we're right now, what? We have a
moment, we're exchanging video letters with two other communities, we as a
community called Finn Horn in Scotland, um which is a spiritual community
that was founded by a person called peter caddy. There's another city
being built in India called Oroville and we're exchanging tapes with them
and there's a networking community in uh new Hampshire called Another
Place and they're part of this video network. And uh I should really get
Richard johnson here to tell you what our cassandra humor is about because
he does a lot of very funny videotapes. Um but they all seem to revolve
around ducks, which I'm not quite sure why,
but that might be an example of the bizarre humor I was talking about uh
we have a lot of heating ducts as well that goes through the buildings and
somehow they get mixed up together. Um the humor is very strange. I'm not
humorous myself, so I have a great difficulty in trying to describe
someone else's humor.
That's the best I can do with that question. Unless somebody were richard
would probably, Yeah.
Yes,
awesome.
Mm look at this.
Yes.
Yeah. Yes.
Oh
yeah, yeah. Uh
mhm
Mhm Yeah. Right. Go crazy without a sense of humor. Too much work you've
got to be able to play, Is it the family that plays together stays
together?
It's true.
This is this is a family, isn't it? In a sense?
No.
Right.
Yeah. Yeah,
I don't know. Let's go over. Um All right.
Yeah. Don't know. But community is a party, Not just people here, there's
2500 about work about and with his staff here changed out I think about
two years, like, like just about all the stats is
die hard, stay on time here, but uh huh. Fire with people, our staff as
you change out told me to use the c case you can see you can come back
staff that you someone that they respect the back back there there and
then we will lose never people all over the country and uh huh Actually,
two recently. Mhm. A lot of
Yeah. Center so be aware that every side of community means the people
here, my back and I'm glad to do anything essentially. Right or not. Yeah
, create advanced I think any more 100 people outside and the girl place
Yeah. People that are here sliding away at the reason these people outside
one of those.
Yeah. Yeah. No. Right.
Yes. Working outside. Yeah. I think that's that's important to look at our
stand in my opinion is to look at our cassandra as a focus of all these
different energies that are spread out over a large part of the country, a
large part of the world and maybe by becoming a synthesizer of a lot of
different activities like like coming and doing kites and having the
lasers go on. And that's a real neat idea that maybe came out of the fact
that we had kites and lasers together. Um, that might not have happened
before. So it seems to be that
having a very clear idea that this place can act almost like a prism that
will focus a lot of different activities into one uh, into a sort of
transcendent kind of look at society where we can begin to change some of
those institutions in our society that don't function properly or humanely
or compassionately and try and come up with some better solutions to what
is happening.
Um, another speaker was asking me and I'm a first come first visitor
myself, what becomes of those who have been to Arcosanti? What are those
persons doing and the outside world, so to speak, as we used to call it a
Talus and where there was a great difference between the inside and the
outside you hear, I say
most people have all kinds of my God, most mm hmm. A lot of people come
here, they're in school work or to school some sort, but if I gave you the
first version, they're going on to school many fish, exciting. We're and
then maybe I'll come back and marry. Not really feel better protection
this place there. I think about many, many people have been here. Yeah.
All right.
Just one I used to think right heart. Mhm. You can't say a strong 25. Yeah.
Mhm. Thanks for english. Yeah, Russell is one of the people that's out in
san Francisco doing things for us all the time is an engineer. He works
for us on and off and comes out once every few months. Right. And so and
also there's some networks being set up in san Francisco on the east coast
michigan all over the country. And in a sense, I suppose one could look at
the critical mass happening almost in an evolutionary sense that uh as
this is sort of the germination ground here at Arcosanti. Again, the focus
and all those seeds go out all over the country and uh spread the idea and
spread the some of the theories that are behind the concept of our ecology.
Um and again, I think this, this whole festival is a focus of that kind
of energy that we're beginning to get, get into. But maybe what I would,
one of the things we could examine is in a way that the role of the artist
architect because a lot of what is happening at Arcosanti is in a way uh
restructuring through the physical structure of a community, how that
community operates and that kind of changes very dramatically the role,
particularly the architect, but also the artist, there can be no more of
the the traditional architects view that you go and you build a building
and then you call in the artist and tell them to decorate something. I
think there has to be much more synthesis between architecture and art and
perhaps by encouraging that kind of synthesis that would help to get the
get some of that critical mass going, the energy flowing through the
process. That's definitely true. I want
do you have a question
myself working?
Okay. Mhm comfortable. Yeah. And you move from real. Yeah. Just a place
that you ever be at living here.
Can you make a common special or unique now? You need to know. Thank you.
Yes. Not all the time. But do you have a clear display?
That's a super question. Uh I think the answer most of the time is no
most of the time is no, it's probably possible
the
the art world of power and acknowledge acknowledgement and endorsement,
becoming a public person, a celebrity. Um moving in circles of power
traveling on airplanes from city to city on matters of great urgency.
It's extremely seductive as everyone knows. It's it's very isolated, You
can live in a city like Los Angeles and new york and become very
successful with that entire game and not know very many people at all and
not be very happy at all. So I think I think it's possible after it's been
done because it makes it um
you kind of have to do it and see that it doesn't really work, you have to
reach critical mass as a professional. That is, if you started in that
game and gotten into it, you have to reach the critical mass and find out
that it's never going to explode. You know, nothing is ever going to
happen. Everything that you do, you only you gain only the right to do
some more of it, so you might as well get out of it and get into something
that hasn't loved in it. And there's an old saying, there's an old chinese
saying um
the man who wields great power does not make a good gardener.
So you kind of got to retire from the power game.
Right? Well, I think, you know what I was talking about when I was talking
about the power in the
in the institutional art game where people are relating either to
corporate power to political power. Political structures of all of my
large commissions have been uh as was characteristic in an earlier
discussion, they've been really contributors to supporting uh the
corporate and political power structures of making,
making what they already do the influence they have on our lives, making
it more palatable to us. And uh I think that's one of the reasons I
started building kites and stop doing that work as much, because
because kids like kites, they like kites more than they like bronze.
Mhm. So, I think, I think the people, the
people have had a lot of experience as artists who who are attracted to
this community. Uh I think there's a wealth of people that would be a
track that are attracted to this community, obvious by the people here.
But there are people who have um like ruth who have who have gone through
a lot of the dimensions of the art world as it's and and tasted some of
its fruit.
I'd like to add something to that too. You see a lot of young people here
and they as a rule, I would imagine do not have families, most of them
probably do not have Children. They're free to move around to go to school
to come here to go back to school as as an artist becomes older and I have
a number of friends who are professional artists, they become more
concerned with
with what tom was calling power, but which may also be interpreted as a
financial security for themselves and their family. You move into a bit of
a family phase perhaps. And it takes going through that before the person
is free to come back to this kind of a situation and perhaps to make kites.
I see it as a cycle. Yeah,
some of these works and I found pretty close to you. Right, quarter. All
right. I'm sorry.
Yeah. Like the raisins are writing essays. They find out for certain Oh
yes podcast.
All of a sudden you've got to find a new sense of motivation really. Yeah.
Right. I bring you comfort upon with associations. A lot seems to be the
artist gets out Because he tends to do two years old. It's a chance he's
going to lose the very thing that he needs and always get very get a place
like this because of the human associations have. But there's where you're
transparent. Don't test it over from here here. It 100 millions of people.
Yes. Well put well put I think it's true that uh our society is probably
uh morbidly concerned with security and we kind of translate security into
financial a financial worth. And in fact, the only true security um I
believe comes from being part of a community because when you have human
support surrounding you, that's far more secure than having a larger bank
account or insurance policy. And I think that's why we feel it's important
that by structuring the kind of environment that you live in, that you can
promote that interchange between all the members of that society allows
the community to become much more cohesive as soon as you have that
ability to interchange between one person and another. So I think that's
why the structuring of the way we put things together is very important.
Yeah, Virginia.
Yes.
Today. Uh No,
you have to start.
Yeah.
So,
where?
Because now is to set forth certain of the missing bills and many as a
culture.
So. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.
Art work.
Mhm. All right. Can I
again?
Yeah.
Well I was I only talk from my own experience but uh the faculty of Black
Mountain at some point did not have even the salary. I mean and I think
the most I think anyone ever got Was $60 a month plus room and board. And
there was there were many many years when they worked for $5 a month-plus
women board which gave them money for gasoline and few incidentals. But I
think that young people have to have that experience. They have to be in
the company of people who I mean they have to experience that with adults
. I think maybe that's the important thing that young people are getting
here article scenting and so that experience has made it possible for
artists in san Francisco to give a lot. And instead of setting up a
community they took san Francisco. The total city as a community where
they brought gardeners and dancer. Performing artists and visual artists
together to use artists as workers. Not as somebody who's going to help
people express themselves but but artists as workers uh as psychiatrists
are workers. Uh huh, probation officers, counselors are workers and use
librarians or workers. Artists have never been considered workers. And by
bringing the group of artists and gardeners and
and and community people together, the young people have found that where
they're rejected by museums and galleries, they can use the side of a
building or they can use the interior of uh of the social welfare office
and beautify that. Or they could use the schools or the jails or the
mental hospitals and work with handicapped Children and workmen in in the
Laguna Honda which is a convalescent hospital for the elderly and work in
senior centers. And use the, the energy of those people who actually use
those buildings, whether it is to get their welfare check or whether it's
to come for tea or lunch, hot lunch. These people are, we discovered that
there are many, many people who are retired actors, musicians and through
the cedar program in san Francisco were able to hire uh seniors for
halftime and they and the artists would come in and do the performance and
then they would discover that there was a spiritual, I mean singer and or
uh an actor and they would take them and go to the next senior center and
they would then get them on the payroll so that they could have a little
income and a little dignity and the young actors and the dancers would get
something from the yeah elder um citizens and elderly citizens and and uh
and then they began to get a mix of old and young together so that and
then walls could be the, and so that artists who are who would never get
are not concerned with the pedestal they're not concerned. I mean they
would like a gallery, they would like the museum show. But in the meantime
what they're doing is they're beautifying housing projects and they're
doing, they're beginning to change the the shape of the city so that
rather than each one of us trying to set up our own you don't thing, we
used the empty schools and to be the background for our activities. And I
think somehow that has allowed artists and the gardeners to become
politically active because they have to get a truck from the city. And
they have to find ways to make the government respond to them to serve the
community, which is ourselves. And I think libraries have gotten guardians
and murals because when you go to the city and they say, well it's going
to cost $5,000 to remove asphalt, you know, in the backyard and it's just
full of weeds. Then the neighborhood gets all of its resources. Uh as
we've been active in with architects and gardeners, they all come in and
we begin to change our own neighborhoods this way so that while it still
belongs in a way in the its government, I mean, which we are part of. I
mean we begin to we begin to take over our neighborhoods. And I think that
then that makes decision making. We share all that decision making among
many, many people young and old and we begin to feed our feed our
neighborhoods. And I know in Chicago and the housing projects by using
housing authority land, which is traditionally been not. I mean the 10ants
have never been permitted to use the gardens or the lawn are now beginning
to raise vegetables. So that in last week's newspaper there was an article
that said that They had raised in one year, $200,000
and the tenants who are welfare, you know, families are now canning
tomatoes and and they're beginning to do those things that don't change
have never changed. And those are the constant things and we have to begin
to to allow people to do those constant things like eating and sleeping
and and maintaining those never change whether you're in the past or in
the future. And and somehow pickling and canning and making jam and all
those things are activities that are cost effective and make people feel
useful and that's in a way. And those are simple decisions that each one
of us can make on our own without permission from government or going out
for grants to do that. And somehow we have to begin to do all those kite
making and all those, you know, things that each one of us can be
motivated to do. You basically seem to be saying that it's a question of
desegregating the city so that one of the basic things that seems to have
happened is the zoning and that's right and control system, that city's
overlay on the structure of the city itself. And as as uh, cities begin to
, I mean, there's inflation and like in California, we have proposition 13
with attacks, we are not going to get those city services that were, you
know, like the street and from you or your sidewalk or all those things
are tree planting. The people have to take those that initiative back
because those are things that anybody can do. And instead of saying, no,
you don't have permission. I mean, there's no reason not to have
permission. There's no, not there's no reason not to have a beautiful
street or, or clean sidewalk. I mean, those are things that we have to
begin to doing and when, and we have to start saying, uh, we have to start
teaching ourselves that we don't throw away a gum wrapper. We don't throw
our peelings on the floor. We don't throw our cups around. We have to take
it until we find a suitable place for it to be the dumped and we can't
afford street cleaners anymore. We have to do all those things ourselves
and it's very, very simple to do. It's very practical, what used to be
that we're getting back to the point where tom was talking about the
dangers of success because in a way, the dangers of succeeding that, uh,
as soon as one becomes successful, then there's a great drive to control
the success by either internally or external forces that exist within the
, the institutional structure of what one has. And I think it's important
to really stress that idea of self responsibility. I think that's uh
something we keep trying to put over to everybody that comes here. It's
also very interesting hearing you talk about the Black Mountain School,
the kind of salaries that people got there because very much the same sort
of thing exists at Arcosanti. And in a way it's sort of a, I guess one
could call it a commitment mechanism to the idea that one has to go
through a readjustment of values to become part of this uh experiment that
we're trying out the question that's raised by this whole idea of the
critical mass is
how can we uh integrate see people who are working in a normative
situation into this sort of unique situation? Because we have a a little
island in the middle of a society that has a whole different set of values
sometimes, or at least that's how it feels sometimes. Um, and how can we
absorb all those people from that society without necessarily overwhelming
the ethic that exists within this small nucleus of you represent the
individual. I think whether you're a group here, you still you still
represent the idea what an individual can do and the strength of an
individual. And I think that that an artist is always alien no matter how
many friends he has. I mean out there in the society out there in the city
, you are isolated, You're not, I mean, you have the same problems. I mean
if you were an artist trying to work in the schools, you have the same
alien nation. So I think it it's the same thing that you're you made a
deal with
the outside community. I don't mean just phoenix. I'm just saying that you
are an idea and I think that yes, and so that hopefully all the young
people that go through Arcosanti will go out there and not feel afraid to
be isolated. And I think that that's an important thing that we learned at
Black Mountain was that we were going to expect our whole life to be, you
know, with confrontations of some sort and you just have to adapt or or
flow or go with it
mainly not to be afraid.
See, I don't know if we really don't know how much time we have. I don't
know if we've addressed any of the solutions to critical mass, but really
, okay, here's the solution. It's not a solution. It's an avoidance of
solution. I wish for Arcosanti
that it never reaches critical mass, that it always stays just short of
its aspirations, stays just short of of power stays just short of prestige
, stays just short of financial independence.
Um,
I apologize maybe for it, but that is the optimum state of health for this.
Maybe, maybe,
you know, I think I appreciate the, the energy that you bring together. I
think it's a very exciting thing to have all everyone here like this, but
I think that it would also be nice to have you do it, but be nice to kind
of spread this kind of thing out throughout the years so that you have,
you don't have it all at once and then, you know, but I realized that you
do have artists coming all time. Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. I
think that's the most wonderful statement.
Um, and that sort of overcomes that dangerous success that you're talking
about doing things and considering the fact that we've always been on that
brink and we've done quite well being that way. And I don't see there's
gonna be anything, it's
going to be any advantage in getting any here huge sums of money. We don't
needhelp