THE CAVE MIND OPERATING SYSTEM

Notorious, fabled “Beat” writer and author of “Naked Lunch”, William S. Burroughs, once defined “paranoia” as “just the state of having all the facts.” Now maybe I’m suffering a little bit from being overwhelmed by facts, but the smiley face has always made me suspicious that it can’t be all that good. At first, Evolutionary biology may not be the most likely refuge of the paranoid, but in the case of the smiley face, it’s brought me nothing less than religion.

The next time your better half, best friend, boss, helpful sales person or gleaming white toothed celebrity smiles at you, think on this—according to Evolutionary biology, the origin of the smile is the reflex that predators make when bearing their teeth at the sight of prospective food. Clearly, there is something we can learn from considering our animal ancestry and in particular, a lot it can teach us about behaviors that we either take for granted, assume we know all about or don’t even question at all. It doesn’t require lifting the veil of time and scrying into the mists of history—it only takes a glimpse at the new gods of sex, drugs, and rock and roll to recognize that we are creatures of biology, first and foremost. Maybe it’s time to use this fact to our advantage once again, given that there are predators like religious fanatics, evil bankers, credit card, and loan sharks on the loose.

I’ve always believed that there’s a lot we can learn from the Upper Paleolithic, a time period when many of our ancestors were retreating from the ice and snow into the solace of fire lit caves. “What can we learn from The Flintstones?” you might ask, besides the fact that all animated shows of yesteryear will at one time or another suffer from being turned into live action features as Hollywood studios trawl the depths of television for recycling purposes. Consider also a trend that Faith Popcorn described in her 1991 book, “The Popcorn Report” which she labeled “cocooning,” whereupon Yuppies are seen as retreating into the new cave of their media centric homes as a way to find relief from the modern rat race. There’s a reason that the root of the word “hearth” is easily found by dropping its final letter “h”. The fireside was once the “heart” of the home and may be again in the form of the postmodern, Green kitchen, if Kevin Henry is right in his latest post on his blog, “The Connected Kitchen”.

My bias is that art usually holds the key to human consciousness at any given time in history and looking at so-called “Prehistoric Art” probably possesses the veritable Keys to the Kingdom. Take for example, the 1879 discovery of the famous cave at Altamira in Spain, which has been called “the Sistine Chapel of Paleolithic Art.” One summer day, a Spanish nobleman and amateur archeologist named Don Marcelino de Sautuola was joined by his young daughter, Maria, in a cave on his estate which he had explored for artifacts many times before. Called by John E. Pfeiffer in his book, "The Creative Explosion: An Inquiry Into the Origins of Art and Religion," “one of the great tales in the annals of prehistory,” this episode can be seen as having something to teach us almost like an Upper Paleolithic OS about the powers of common sense and seeing to through the obvious.

Now the stuff of legend, his daughter (whose age varies according the particular account from five and seven to twelve), had wandered into a small, side chamber that was three-to-five feet high in most places. Don Marcelino had traversed it numerous times without noticing what made his daughter cry out loud, “Toros, toros, toros!” Interesting was that in his search for stone artifacts, he was always scouring the floor of the cave and had never actually looked up at the ceiling. As Pfeiffer describes it, “Nothing had prepared Sautuola for the shock of such a discovery. He had explored the chamber and thought he knew what was in it.” While he had used his lantern to avoid being bumped on the head by the protuberances that were covered with vivid paintings in black, red, pinks, and browns, it was by the lantern light that his child made the discovery simply by looking up. Little did she realize that in doing so and revealing the hidden prehistoric art that it would turn her father into an advocate tied to evolutionary theory and to his grave be much maligned as a crank and charlatan by the then protectionist, doubting world of traditional archeology.

An inspiration for his courage in facing harsh criticism that saw the cave paintings as forgeries, his story provides us with OS Principle Number One from the Upper Paleolithic:

1. SOMETIMES A BUMP ON THE HEAD IS A GOOD THING

In other words, always Look Up in addition to staring at your feet! This is also known as OVER, UNDER, SIDEWAYS, DOWN or the Yardbirds’ Principle since it’s named after their 1965 hit.

Many of the famous caves in Western Europe from the Upper Paleolithic were discovered by children. This includes the most celebrated one of all, France’s Lascaux Cave, discovered in 1940 by four youths who were chasing a pet dog named Robot, who had disappeared into a hole in the ground that turned out to lead to the great subterranean galleries below. Some are even named after their youthful discoverers like “Les Trois Freres” after the three young brothers who first crawled its lengths.

As Pfeiffer says about Maria, the discoverer of the Altamira cave, “…she was too young to have acquired a bias against looking up rather than looking down.” He continues that her father, “…had no real interest in the walls or ceiling of the cave. He was an excavator interested above all in what he could find at his feet, on the floor, such things as flint artifacts and bones and remains of hearths. The low ceiling of the side chamber was only a hazard to him, something to avoid.” The point is that life is at the very least, three-dimensional and we need to see ourselves both inside and out of the box in order to be creative and truly “think outside the box”.

This leads us inevitably to OS Principle Number Two from the Upper Paleolithic:

2. WHEN IN DOUBT, ASK A CHILD

When in doubt, don’t let age or experience be a factor. I remember once when my daughter was four and she asked me, “Daddy, why does infinity never stop?” For the first time as a parent, I had the survival instinct to ask her instead of trying to come up with any sort of reasonable answer. “What do you think, honey?” I asked her. Without losing a beat she replied, “Because they ran out of numbers!” You might be astounded by the insights offered by the unbiased eyes of the culturally agnostic and the brains of young souls who are closer to the tabula rasa.

Pfeiffer says, “Archeological records include many cases of art overlooked. The eye never comes innocent to its subject. Everything seen is a blend of what actually exists out there, the “real” object, and the viewer’s expectations, upbringing, and current state of mind. It is amazing what you can miss when you do not expect to see anything or, given a strong enough motive, what you can see that is not there. Unless the mind is properly adjusted or set, anticipating a revelation of a particular sort, nothing happens.”

Principle three, therefore, follows this theme of perception:

3. YOU CAN’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU SEE AND HEAR, CAN YOU?

Otherwise known as the “Up From The Skies” Principle after the lyrics from Jimi Hendrix. Or better yet, it could be called “Anticipate Revelation.”

Why do the Aboriginal people of Australia believe that our world is the dream and that the true world is the Dreamtime beyond our consensus reality? With 40,000 to 50,000 years of experience to draw upon, one has to ask the question. Like the San people of South Africa, the Aborigines are one of the only cultures who still have an ongoing tradition of painting caves.

You don’t have to get tribal to appreciate the Other Side of the Sky. There is a story about visionary English poet, William Blake, that is a case in point. Upon hearing a knock on the door, his wife once answered the caller’s inquiry as to whether Mr. Blake was at home, by responding: “No. He spends most of his time in heaven.”

Shamanic cultures tend not to throw out anything that works. In other words, if you are bent on survival, why dispose of the practical. This is just one factor that supports the efficacy of shamanism as an alternative medical practice as well as a way of seeing that there are many more worlds than ordinary “9 to 5” reality. Chief Seattle took this to its logical conclusion when he said, “There is no death, only a change of worlds.”

Like quantum physicists, cave dwellers and modern tribal peoples believe that the stone walls of caves are more like membranes between this world and that of the ancestors. So, placing a painting of one’s own handprint on top of an ancestor’s creates a link where one is able to touch and pass through to a kind of historic continuum to the ancestral chain of being. Drawing an animal is believed to have been an appeal on the part of hunters to ask permission of their quarry’s spirit prior to hunting for food.

The representations of animals in the Upper Paleolithic caves are so realistic that they seem to breathe, especially in torchlight and placed as they often are on outcrops that enhance their shape—the artists were obviously very familiar at close range to their subject and their depictions are in many cases without peer in the millennia that have transpired since. No less than the like of Picasso testified to this when, after seeing the extinct Altamira bison created 15,000 thousand years previously, remarked: “ None of us could paint like that.”

This raises how art enters the picture, which brings us to principle number four:

4. WHAT IS WORK TO ONE CAVEMAN IS ANOTHER MAN’S ART

In his illuminating book on cognitive archeology, “Shamanism and the Ancient Mind”, James L. Pearson says: “From the first discovery of prehistoric painting at Altamira to the stunning finds at Grotte Cosquer and Chauvet Cave in the 1990’s, researchers have tried to uncover the meaning of this Ice Age art and the function of the painted caves.” The field of study that undertakes to explore the caves and other sites associated with such decoration is called “Rock Art,” a label that, while helpful for academics, presents some semantic problems when looked at with the tribal eye.

The basic issue is not only how to define art—a challenge we’ll leave to the experts for now—but according to Steven Mithen in “The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art and Science”: “…the definition of art is culturally specific. Indeed many societies who create splendid rock paintings do not have a word for art in their language.”

Is “rock art” art if the producers didn’t think so? For most of the 20th century, prevailing wisdom associated cave art with hunting magic. Others scholars and researchers like Mircea Eliade, Joan Halifax, Weston La Barre, Andreas Lommel, and David Whitley suggested that Lascaux, Les Trois Freres and other rock art sites depicted shamans and supernatural helpers.

World-renowned authorities Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams expanded on a preceding neuropsychological model and combined it with ethnography in their 1998 book “The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves”: “The way in which each individual cave was structured and decorated was a unique result of the interaction of four elements: the topography of the cave, its passages, and chambers; the universal functioning of the human nervous system and in particular, how it behaves in altered states; the social conditions, cosmologies, and religious beliefs of the different times at which a cave was used; and lastly, the catalyst—the ways in which individual people and groups of people exploited and manipulated all of these elements for their own purposes.”

The most fascinating connection that is made in the neuropsychological model is between the actual symbolic elements in rock art and phosphene action that takes place in the human eye, whether during altered or natural states. Just rub your eyes and you’ll see these shapes and signs that are created by the firing of the optic nerve. Many are universal forms like jigsaws, dots, rakes, and spirals that appear throughout rock art sites across millennia and all over the world. The question then becomes how much of what we see is conscious and how much is not?

In this view, what is considered as representational art has a connection to the ability to create symbols with intention, and turns creative expression into an index as to the level of consciousness of a specific culture at a particular time and space. Cognitive archeology says that the production of representational art requires a certain brain capacity that sees outside itself. When I’ve taken tribal people from different cultures to see the rock art sites in the local Santa Monica Mountains, they are always careful to offer interpretations circumscribed by their own culture. “To us,” they start with a disclaimer, “these paintings represent clan symbols.” But, they are always deferential about the meaning, intent or purpose for the tribe who created them. This perspective leads to our next principle:

5. SOMETIMES A CIGAR IS JUST A CIGAR

As Freud famously said. The bottom line in terms of my own experience at rock art sites is that you can’t dismiss that some of paintings and petroglyphs were just doodling and a sort of tribal version of “Kilroy Was Here” message. Maybe it was just a fine day around the water hole where hunter-gatherers had the luxury of some extra time on their hands and thought to memorialize their afternoon with their mark. So, we have to consider that some of the “art” may have not been conceived of as representational or symbolic at all, but just as either functional—as with hunting magic—or doodles that were pleasing to the eye but meant nothing more. But, one of the manias of our scientific age is to attempt to find a rational way to explain everything.

One of the difficulties in rock art research is that there is no Rosetta Stone handy to decipher pictographs and petroglyphs. Outside of cultures with living traditions of rock art like the Aborigine and San people, it is not straight forward to interpret what they mean. Instead, we are often left with the beautiful problem of confronting meaning ourselves as a primary experience without interpretation—with nothing between us and the original maker of the markings—and a rare occurrence that we should treasure in this media immersive world that interprets our experience of the world to death for us in over three thousand advertisements, logos, and consumer messages a day.

So, what may be art to us with historical distance from the circumstances and cultural context in which cave paintings were created, they may have had quite a functional purpose to those who originally produced it, whether it was to evoke the ancestors, supernatural or animal powers or clan territory. My take is that even though the scientific method and was born out of the Age of Reason and out of rejection of religious belief, it still is based in part on fear of the Unknown. The search for meaning is one way to moderate fear, leading naturally to our next precept:

6. DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK

Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is not a train. One of the most impressive thing about caves is the kind of absolute darkness that we ordinarily never experience. To enter one, you often have to deal with fear. On some primordial level, you feel as if you are leaving the lighted world to say nothing of carrying along the cultural baggage of the collective unconscious associated with the netherworld.

Imagine what it must have been like to descend into one of these places as a twelve-year-old initiate in Upper Paleolithic society, led by the most frightening person in the tribe—the shaman—and making your way by hook and by crook, on your hands and knees, in the mud and underground streams, listening to the drip-drip-drip of water seeping from the land above mixed with the strange sounds of nether dwelling life forms and suddenly seeing forms of animals and other strange shapes come alive with lighting of the shaman’s lamp. It probably was an experience that would give religion to any one of us.

A recent book by Martin Lindstrom called “Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy” features excellent material relating to the use of fMRI technology, but one finding, in particular, is quite surprising. The results of fMRI scans have demonstrated a connection between religion and consumer behavior. Apparently, experiments showed that the part of the brain activated during religious ceremonies and experiences is the same as the region which is active during shopping, watching commercials, and gazing at corporate logos.

Ad Age reported on April 6 about findings from the New York Buyology Symposium that presented brain scanning data making correlations between “cult-like brands” such as Harley Davidson and Ferrari and the emotional drivers associated with believers in the world’s largest religion, Christianity.

Dr. Gregory Berns is a psychiatrist who is also a leading authority on neuroeconomics, and biomedical engineering. Neuroeconomics is a study that combines neurology, psychology and economics and looks at understanding how individuals and groups make decisions, take risks, and experience rewards. One of the primary tools that they use is fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) which studies brain response by correlating specific neuron firing in the brain with the decision making process.

Berns’ new book, "Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How To Think Differently," reveals the limitations that the fear response places on creativity and innovation. In an extended interview in the current edition of Super Consciousness magazine, he says, “The importance of the distinctions in how each of us sees the world cannot be underestimated…perception is not something that is immutably hardwired into the brain.” He profiles recent findings that show how we are capable of transforming the way we perceive life and can redirect neurological firing. It’s not an easy feat, requiring extraordinary mental training and energy, but the idea stands as one of the fundamental principles of neuroeconomics.

According to Berns: “…one of the brain’s primary survival mechanisms is conserving energy. The brain does this by limiting energy expenditure during normal everyday awareness…for most people, though, breaking out of the comfort zone of their energy conservative perceptions is often a fearful proposition.”

He goes on to say that fear limits our ability to be creative and is a huge impediment to innovation. Similar to Malcolm Gladwell’s recent treatment in “Outliers”, Berns sees the great innovators as outsiders and iconoclasts who are able to face risk, “but cognitively reframe (such situations) so as to estimate some kind of likelihood of success or failure to make a decision.” He calls it “the optimism bias,” which allows them to “downplay negative scenarios” as opposed to buy into the uncertainty or ambiguity that are at the root of primal fear. It’s interesting that structural ambiguity is a feature of many video game design as described, for example, by Jim Gasperini in “Structural Ambiguity: An Emerging Interactive Aesthetic” in “Information Design” edited by Robert Jacobsen.

Economists call one kind of uncertainty risk where there is a possibility of success or failure, but one can estimate the odds and determine some likelihood of the outcome. Neuroscience indicates that the fear response is generated when we don’t have a complete picture or a state of ambiguity. The current financial crisis has inspired fear, according to Berns, because we don’t have all the facts about how deep it is and how far it’s going to go.

In a May Atlantic article about the financial crisis, Cody Lundin says, “Risk-taking went over the edge. We are inventing something new. We’re very afraid. We know from the Depression that people who lived through it didn’t change their mentality for the rest of their lives. They were sewing socks. They refused to take a lot of chances. My sense is that it will take 10 or 20 years to find that spark of risk-taking in people again.”

The way that we approach risk is at the basis of strategy. One of the things that our hunter-gatherer ancestors learned from animals is low risk behavior. Berns describes it as, “…head in the sand, everyone in the bunker, cut back spending, hoard what I have, and wait for the storm to pass. That is a very instinctual response and again, goes back to the survival instinct. When you are afraid, you tend to retreat and hoard what you have. Animals that have the capacity to think through the situation just wait it out. That is a low risk strategy and will probably work to maintain your status quo, which is fine if that is what you want. The innovator sees everyone else doing that, and it is precisely in those circumstances that it makes the most sense for them to take risks.”

Fear is, therefore, not the optimal operating system. In “The Science of Fear”, Daniel Gardner demonstrates how many irrational fears are based on the way that humans miscalculate risks. To be creative, perhaps innovate, and ultimately, to succeed, we need to transcend fear of the cave of the mind. In one of his notebooks, Leonardo Da Vinci wrote: “Drawn by my eager wish, desirous of seeing the great confusion of the various strange forms created by ingenious nature, I wandered for some time among the shadowed cliffs and came to the entrance of a great cavern. I remained before it for a while stupefied and ignorant of the existence of such a thing. With my back bent and my left hand resting on my knee, and shading my eyes with my right, with lids lowered and closed, and often bending this way and that to see whether I could discern anything within. But this was denied me by the great darkness inside and after I stayed a while, there arose in me two things: fear and desire. Fear, because of the menacing dark cave, and desire to see whether there were any miraculous thing within.”

Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending argue in their new book, “The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution” that recent genetic change has been far more expansive than the traditional “great leap forward” that scientists believed defined human beings some 40,000 to 50,000 years ago. This was the period which also gave us the birth of artistic expression with examples of the so-called Venus sculptures appearing 40,000 to 60,000 years ago and a flute dated at some 54,000 years. The actual beginnings of art are the subject of much debate and estimates can range up to 100,000 years ago. What is agreed on is that a creative explosion took place around 30,000 years ago, the date of the Chauvet Cave and amazingly, in full development. Whether Cochran and Harpending’s theory has validity or not, I still think that the invention of fire is pretty hard to top with language and art a close second and third. The nature of images, whether art or otherwise, leads to our final principle:

7. THINK BEYOND WORDS

Maybe it all comes down to what Fred Barnard once said in 1921 when he coined the expression, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” He was speaking about the signs on the sides of streetcars. No matter, if the cave mind operating system has a purpose for us today, it’s because it drives us with mysterious images to think beyond words, to face our fears, and find consciousness in the stars that light up our brains.

THE VAMPIRE THEORY OF ROCK AND ROLL

Nobody knows exactly when or where rock and roll started, but it’s probably a good bet that it started at the crossroads in Mississippi where blues legend, Robert Johnson, made his pact with the Devil. There are many variations on this theme as all great origin myths deserve. One describes how Johnson was directed to arrive at midnight at a plantation crossroads where the Dark Stranger tuned his guitar. In another version, he was given a guitar by the father of all agents and learned how to play like a demon in just one night while sitting on top of a gravestone in a local cemetery. What we do know from Johnson’s contemporaries who described his amazing, seemingly overnight talent and success, and his surviving masterpiece recording are enough evidence to speculate on a supernatural origin for his unique skill. Whatever actually happened, the Faustian bargain certainly informed a lot about music industry business models ever since. But what’s more important is that rock and roll has always been informed by a death wish probably since it’s an adolescent music at heart that is uncertain about mortality, but as foolishly daring as a teenage driver with a fast car.

The first recording with the actual title, “Rock and Roll”, was released by the Boswell Sisters in 1934. Hardly a rhythmic cousin inspired by the long snake moan of the Delta Blues, this trio’s song spreads the message in a big band, pop setting, but the meaning is still clear despite it’s white bread, if swinging delivery. It’s still all about sex even though drugs and electrification would arrive later. Rock and Roll takes a cue from the industry standard of “farewell tours” in that, its death has been exaggerated and proclaimed many times from early cynics like Frank Sinatra and Steve Allen. The former loudly denigrated rockers as lowlifes, miscreants, traitors, and troglodytes. He especially singled out The Beatles who he called “creeps” and cultural enemies of the state—though he was later to repent with a rather flaccid cover of “Something”. Steve Allen famously tried his best to cut the young upstart rock and roll down to size by humiliating Elvis Presley during an early TV appearance when he had the King sing “Hound Dog” to a real dog set on a pedestal.

They were not alone in the 50’s when “concerned” parent groups, white “citizen’s councils” and other community organizations attempted to alert families to the dangers of this musical form which created juvenile delinquents and whose connections to African Americans and the sensual abandon of jazz were clearly outrageous game changers. Nobody could have predicted what was to come despite early warnings like the West African beat of Bo Diddley. You didn’t have to drum along to the “bump de bump, bump, bump, bump” to add the grind to the recipe and realize that this music was all about the beat and like a jungle telegraph echoed its earlier tribal origins.

Maybe the white status quo sensed that this revolutionary music of slaves and field hands like the great American 20th century poet, Muddy Waters, could lead somehow to overturn the Establishment—their instincts were correct given rock and roll’s eventual cutting of a swath from the Delta through to America’s blackboard jungles, urban sprawl and a neo-tribalistic sequence of youth mutations of sock-hops, boogeying in the back of mom and dad’s car and at the drive-in, screaming Beatles fans, love-ins at Monterey and Woodstock, fan sites, Hip Hop culture successfully invading the suburban mall, and web rings, and Band MySpace pages.

Even the attempted co-opting of rock and roll by safe, white singers like Pat Boone, for example, who hijacked Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” , divesting it of its undulating, native rhythms and innuendo (“Got a gal named Sue, she knows just what to do”) was only a blip. Disco was another Barbarian at the Gates which ultimately failed to take its mantle and actually inspired post MC5 punk, and was ceremoniously served its own funeral pyre at a disco record burning at Comiskey Park in Chicago in 1976. In a frightening reprise of 50’s censorship and parental concern, the PMRC (Parents Music Resource Council) spearheaded by drummer and Vice Presidential spouse, Tipper Gore, was successful in providing convenient labels for popular music to point out its incipient dangers to parents too lazy to listen to the lyrics themselves. Rock and roll survived the labeling system and other vain efforts to stop the beat of time.

Who killed rock and roll, then? Well, like its historical collateral damage of multiple rock and roll suicides, it actually succumbed to self-immolation like a speeding kamikaze guitar run—not in a grand crescendo of Marshall stacks feeding back overamped to 11 with smoke bombs and drums thrilling in deafening splendor—but in greed, naiveté, and most of all, as the result of a generational shift. The beginning of the end was actually in 1968. It was in that year that The Doors decided to sell “Light My Fire” to Buick as a soundtrack for a car commercial. It not only was a source of contention between Jim Morrison and the other three band members—because Jim didn’t want to do it—but the start of a lethal love affair between Madison Avenue and its musical concubine. It was Advertising that killed the Beast.

If Mad Ave killed rock and roll, then MTV was the nail in the coffin. The idea of “music” television may have sounded like a good idea at the time because the inmates had never run the asylum. Rock and roll was always an embarrassment in the television of the 50’s and 60’s. Shows like “Hullabaloo” and “Shindig” suffered from producers and network executives doing too much frugging at clubs with go-go girls and having bad acid experiences that became the TV light shows of op-art, fisheye, multiple single-frame, swirling psychedelia of wall paper surrounding recording artists of the day. Rock was certainly the wicked stepchild of the musical arts. It always seemed to be introduced as the embarrassing poseur, and black sheep of the family—which it was proudly when it worked well.

Ed Sullivan opened up the television stage in what seemed to be a genuine commercial desire to connect with music of all kinds—but the network censors did their best to emasculate bands like The Doors—who infamously did not change the word “higher” in their performance of “Light My Fire” and The Rolling Stones, eventually to become one of rock’s billion dollar conglomerates who did, in fact, change the lyrics to “Let’s Spend The Night Together”, by substituting “some time” in lieu of “the night”. Maybe the art of negotiation made them a better business proposition in the long term. As they say, "you can’t always get what you want."

But, creating visual interpretations by twenty-something, music video “directors” is dodgy because it eliminates the primary experience that is the salient feature of music as an art form. Music videos substitute a visual interpretation that is often quite literal or at the other end of the spectrum, totally contrived, as a substitute for the listener coming to terms with their own experience as it connects with what a song is saying. They were also blatant commercials to upsell records. When The Beatles did early videos for songs like “I Am The Walrus” from “The Magical Mystery Tour”, and “All You Need Is Love”, there was a purity and charm to them because they were unpremeditated and seemed almost like afterthoughts.

The other danger factor was pointed out to me once during a conversation with Frank Zappa just after MTV came on the scene. “How did MTV change music, Frank?” I asked. Without losing a beat, the Maestro intoned, blowing out a plume of smoke, “It turned musicians into models.”

It also had the effect of connecting popular music more directly with the advertisers who would be its nemesis. While it was a rarity for rock and roll to infiltrate the province of Madison Avenue jingles and Hollywood soundtracks, that began to change as rock and roll, itself, became less of a movement and more of a business. Its mass appeal could no longer be denied as it became newsworthy when colorful, Dionysian multitudes grew to attend festivals and stadiums. Even the gold and platinum standards for record sales had to be adjusted higher to accommodate increased audiences for the category. Movie executives were also smoking dope and doing the Swim, and started catering to yuppie audiences with nostalgic, Motown-infused soundtracks replacing or augmenting original motion picture scores. Like music videos, some movies such as “The Big Chill” leaned far too heavily on conveying emotional weight by literally using “The Weight” instead of dialogue and character to drive story structure.

In the 50’s and 60’s, rock and roll wasn’t really a business yet because it was easy to deny. I remember a visit with Little Richard at his house which had been at the Hyatt on Sunset for many years. He proudly displayed his gold records to my brother and me, and remarked that they were the first he’d ever received. This was in 1995. The rip-offs of seminal artists like Richard, Chuck Berry, and others who were denied royalties or entered into bad deals is now the stuff of history with some reparations made, usually through court settlements. Contracts in the 60’s looked like they were signed with a pen in one hand and a joint in the other. I watched “Monterey Pop” recently with my kids who are 8 and 15 and saw that—through their eyes and questions—that it was almost like viewing an ethnographic documentary. It all looks so naive and innocent, and many of the musicians were, too, with respect to the business side of music.

I’ve worked with D.A. Pennebaker on a number of projects who with Richard Leacock and also with the Maysles were largely responsible for cinema verite style of film making. Pennebaker is also well known for his great documentary, “Don’t Look Back”, which documented Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour of England. When I was clearing the video rights for “Don’t Look Back” and “Monterey Pop” as well as on another project for the 20th anniversary of Woodstock, I had to reference the original artist contracts. Jimi Hendrix’s contract for Monterey was signed by his lawyer and most likely never seen by him. The Who were paid $2500 for their Woodstock performance, and were only among several who insisted—and actually got paid for the celebrated free festival. Although he was the first artist to be paid a hundred-thousand dollars for one concert, Jimi left only twenty-thousand when he died. Tom Petty talks about when, as a teenager, he first signed with MCA Records and didn’t understand how books entered into it when he saw the clause about “publishing”. He had the courage and fortitude to eventually sue to get his royalty earnings from publishing, but many such sagas do not share such a happy ending. Even if artists were not paying a lot of attention to deal terms, there were a lot of record company executives, managers, shysters, agents, interlopers, and operators who were.

It was only natural that rock and roll became an industry in the 80’s fueled by cocaine, hookers and other fresh marketing tactics that innovated from the original 50's payola techniques. But most of all, it was the introduction of the CD format that changed the business model. And why shouldn’t it have? Imagine the first meeting where the concept was tendered: “I want to replace vinyl with this!” (Holds up disc which glints like gold in the Hollywood sunlight streaming through the high windows). “What is that?” “It’s plastic. The total cost is going to be about $2.50 to manufacture and including all your distribution and marketing costs! And guess what? We can mark it up as much as 100%! And it will create a whole new market for players, too!” The executive probably was cynical at first, especially at the low cost, but the rest is history as we replaced our collection with an audiophile digital version—even though “Who’s Next” still sounds better on vinyl.

Inevitably, in a lesson that Wall Street should have paid attention to, greed caught up. The Industry now only consists of several major labels left standing or somewhat tottering worldwide in a landscape of thousands of independent labels, a new singles business invented by iTunes, Limewire, MySpace fan pages, Mac garage band, and Amazon downloads. The Internet broke the bank with the Napster peer-to-peer sharing model and a generation that took piracy to another level entirely—evidenced now by Apple relenting last week on DRM. Not only were the inmates now running the asylum, but they were controlling the distribution, too.

The record business is now the iPod economy with well over 100 million sold, over half a billion iTunes software downloads, over $120 million in 2007 profits, and well over a $1billion worth of digital downloads annually. The major labels should have seen that we were on the eve of a new singles business—instead it decided it was a better idea to sue its own customers.

As the mass audience for music grew in the 80’s, arena rock established the tour and merchandise as the revenue model. With the decline in record sales in the last decade, looking to the 90’s heyday when million-sellers used to be the rule, now a hundred thousand unit seller is a big deal outside of certain legacy performers. The only two growth markets for records are for world music and Christian rock which grew from 4% of overall sales in 2000 to over 10% last year. Maybe Jesus will resuscitate the Big Beat, but given the cryogenic state of the industry today, it is clearly a job for an entity with supernatural powers.

Where we are now is that the music, itself, is the Trojan horse stalking consumers as the advertisement for the tour and merchandise. On average, there are forty-thousand concerts a year with average attendance of five thousand tickets sold. The average merchandise per person is 6-8 per customer, but it can be upwards of $20 depending on the artist and with annual market of approximately $1.5 billion. That’s a lot of t-shirts.

The band logo is the final stamp of the rock group as corporation. Advertising killed rock because it legitimized it. Rock and roll’s very existence was that it was the illegitimate child of rhythm and blues, jazz, the Delta, and far off Yoruba beats. As the baby boomers grew older, they became the captains of industry and technology and Madison Avenue and selfishly wanted to hear their own soundtrack—even if appropriated to a thirty-second spot. Bruce Springsteen ordered a cease and desist when Ronald Reagan tried to use his “Born In The USA” for promoting the Republican cause in the 80’s. That should have been a sign.

I mean, Fleetwood Mac in association with Bill Clinton is self-explanatory in a cuddly, yuppie sort of way. But now, rock music is a featured player without guilt and plays party agnostic at political conventions, on the campaign trail, and inaugural balls. How does this scenario equate with “Born To Be Wild” and the bikers getting blown away at the end of “Easy Rider”? How does political endorsement add up when compared to the spirit of Jimi Hendrix’s deconstruction masterpiece performance of the National Anthem during the Vietnam War and Berkeley riots?

When I was growing up in the 60’s, my junior high school gym coach used to call me “Hair” and vilified my music wishing that it would die. It made my passion for the music even stronger. Now, I find it irksome that Bruce Springsteen and Prince perform at the Super Bowl, and rock and roll is the soundtrack to television sports—adding its energy, guitar army, and percussive attack to connect with its viewers who all apparently have grown too old to remember when rock and roll was outlaw music. And am I alone in wondering what “Who Are You” has to do with forensics? Maybe it’s in memories like my battles with the gym coach where rock still lives—as a memory, the music exists as a reference point in time when a song or a band or a show references a moment in our lives that was significant—or even if it was insignificant as Robert Plant once put it—as something “deep and meaningless”. He also said, “I’ve lived a hundred years in rock and roll.” Perhaps that’s long enough for those who have really lived it, but that’s another story…

The day after Keith Moon died, my brother, Jeff, finally got to interview John Entwistle and Roger Daltrey for his movie, “The Kids Are Alright”. During the interview, he asked Roger about the future of rock and roll—a pointed question for The Who, at least, given that they’d just lost their key man. Roger said to him, “Rock and roll doesn’t have a future, so shut up!” That sort of ended the interview, but Jeff still used “Long Live Rock”, with its anthemic refrain, “Rock is Dead” for the end credits of the film—whether to give hope or irony, I’ll never ask for fear it would be a repeat of what Pete Townshend once said to him when Jeff asked what the meaning of his song, “Who Are You” was. Pete replied slyly, “Ask Harold Pinter.” My brother and I always wanted to riff on Pete's famous lines from "My Generation" and say to him, "Hope we get old before we die..." But, we never found the right moment and the lyrics seemed to have haunted him ever since anyway. Rock and roll does not look well in the mirror.

Rock and roll suffers from having become our classical music. It’s cross-generational now. When I was running the Jimi Hendrix Foundation, he had a greatest hits collection called “The Ultimate Experience” that had been selling twenty-thousand units a month for almost two years. Estate Creative Director and former Hendrix producer, Alan Douglas, wondered who was buying all these records and conducted a marketing survey. The results were that 60% of the albums were being bought by fans under twenty. Jimi was now effectively converting his third generation of fans from beyond the grave. But, then again, Jimi is a classical composer now.

Rock and roll shouldn’t age gracefully for some kind of old timers day, endless reunion tours, and unplugged sets. Maybe Keith, Jimi, Janis, Jim, Brian, Buddy, Ritchie, Gene, Eddie, Otis, and all the others were lucky in some way to be frozen in time. The problem with rock and roll is that it was always a euphemism for the mystery dance, so perhaps we were screwed from the beginning. And maybe, just maybe, rock and roll isn’t dead after all, but is just about to start out on one of its annual “farewell tours.” As the song says, “Hail, hail…”

EARTH 2.0

Does anyone else find it alarming that there is now a back up plan for Planet Earth? In a Special Report in the 28 February 2009 edition of New Scientist, there was an article on the emergent field of Geoengineering that stopped me dead in my tracks. Here was a world of the future being described in terms of Artificial Trees, Space Mirrors, Cloud Seeding, Ocean Fertilization, Sunshades, Biochar, Carbonate Addition, and a host of other scientific remedies for what the article also described as our current stance “in the face of potentially catastrophic climate change.” Some methods are low tech like planting trees, others conjure sci-fi like placing mirrors in orbit. All address either taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere or diverting solar energy from the Earth in order to dampen the greenhouse effect.

At a recent meeting about Geoengineering in London of British politicians and a selection of climate scientists, “the politicians and scientists all agreed that since cuts to carbon emissions will likely fall short we need to be exploring ‘Plan B’.” That said, there was agreement that “there is no single global thermostat which will bring about universal cooling.” While many of the above tactics are decades from realization, the really scary thing is that several have already been “field tested.” The good news is that they have inspired calls for international regulation.

Ocean fertilization, a technique which employs the “seeding” of the ocean with iron filings to stimulate CO2-eating plankton, has been tried by a firm called Planktos ironically enough off of the Galapagos Islands of Darwinian fame. The impact on ocean ecosystems is unknown at present and inspired protests by environmental groups including ETC. As a result of the protests, the London Convention on Marine Pollution acted to extend its agreement with 80 countries to include Geoengineering and also imposed a ban on commercial fertilization. It all conjures up the image of some “Greenfinger” individual mad scientist or nation acting single-handedly to combat climate change.

New Scientist reports that we came close in November 2005, when Yuri Izrael, former vice-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Head of the Russian Global Climate and Ecology Institute attempted to persuade Vladimir Putin to release 600,000 tons of sulphur aerosol particles into the atmosphere “immediately.” No one knows what the impact would have been, but David Santillo, a senior research scientist at Greenpeace Research Laboratories said that if a nation or individual decided to go it alone, “there would almost certainly be an international diplomatic incident.” The US is not without blame either having conducted “rain seeding” programs during the Vietnam War. Whether it is severe drought or the rising of temperatures of between 5 and 10 degrees centigrade within decades, from methane releases to thawing permafrost and even “the breakdown of entire ecosystems”, the forecast is not for cheap sunglasses.

Still, our approach to carbon emissions is leisurely in the face of the fact that the US and China combine to now produce 40% of all such pollution (according to The Nation). The most recent European studies indicate a rise in the ocean levels of between 2 and 4 meters at the very least by 2100 along with shortages of fresh water—regardless of what measures are taken “yesterday” to control carbon in the atmosphere. We have "a very short window of time," Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, indicated in remarks at a Worldwatch conference last January, adding that the Obama Administration's stated goal of reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 "falls short of the response needed by world leaders." Alan Weisman takes the idea of humanity’s impact on the planet several steps further and envisions what the earth would be like starting two-hundred years from now when humans disappear entirely from the scene. In his riveting 2007 book, The World Without Us, he presents a picture of the New York subways becoming underground rivers causing the streets above to crumble under the weight of skyscrapers and where the “asphalt jungle becomes a real one”. His scenarios are not the stuff of B movies, but are based on hard science and current situations like the nightmare of polymer "atolls" that are already growing in the gyres of the Pacific Ocean.

When I visited the Amazon in the 1970’s, I saw the scale of seemingly everything there as prehistoric—from the fabled Victoria Regia lilies that are so large that their leaves can be up to 3 meters wide with stems 7-8 meters long—to the world’s largest serpent, the Anaconda, which can grow to 45-60 feet long. (I have a photo of one which is only about 40 feet).What I felt most of all was the grandeur and power of nature which gave me faith that no matter what we humans were capable of doing to our home world, that the Earth had the ability to rebound in its own time. Weisman’s book also reveals an elegiac element in what he calls “the earth’s capacity for self-healing.”

I always wanted to visit the Amazon ever since encountering a mysterious reference in a book that changed my life called “Morning of the Magicians". I read the book when I was 15, and it enthralled me with arcane knowledge from the strange worlds of Charles Fort and contemporary alchemists living in Europe to the occult forces at work in Hitler’s Germany and the Thule Project. The obscure reference that titillated me most was the example the authors, Ernst Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, used to describe their perspective that despite the pursuit of science, there were still many worlds as yet unknown and new lands to be discovered. An area they cited between two tributaries of the Amazon, the Xingu and the Rio Tapajos, were said to contain thousands of acres of still unexplored territory. Later, coming across a Pink Floyd soundtrack for “Obscured By Clouds”, I was equally inspired by finding a map of New Guinea that still had areas that were marked with the same title of the movie.

The Xingu area is where a real Indiana Jones figure, explorer Colonel Percy H. Fawcett, disappeared without a trace. His story is now examined in a thrilling new biography by David Grann who retraced Fawcett’s final expedition in “The Lost City of Z". I was warned not to go to Xingu, but it was the humans that I was told about and not the native flora, fauna or tribal peoples. It was 1976 and the first leg of the Trans-Amazonica Highway had opened up the region to an influx of prospectors, cattlemen, farmers, rogues, mercenaries, and other characters straight out of our own historical Wild West. During my own “expedition”, I was warned that as a “gringo”, it would be unwise to stray far into the Interior.

What I found were t-shirts with logos, beer bottles, and communal TV sets that signaled the arrival of so-called Western culture and civilization, but what looked like the beginning of the end to me. It reminds me now of a hilarious incident described by Tony Horwitz in his 2008 book, “A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World". When the Mayflower Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock, they were met by Squanto, the chief of the Patuxet Indians who had already encountered enough white men to greet the Pilgrims in their own tongue. His first word of greeting to them was more like a question when he said, “Beer.” It’s not reported by history whether the Pilgrims were able to accommodate him, but no matter—his word set the karmic destiny of a nation, but that is a subject for a future post…or two.

My visit to the Amazon occurred before the martyrdom of Amazonian activist, Chico Mendes, and the real firestorm in the rain forest, but the jungle was already burning. I met one mercenary pilot who worked for an oil company and was just letting loose bombs over clearings in the vast jungle canopy wherever there was an opening that betrayed the existence of a tribal village. Lawlessness was the rule of the day and many of the towns in the Amazon looked like tropical, if very downscale versions of the typical frontier town of American Westerns.

It is well-known that the trees of the Amazon recycle carbon dioxide and generate at least 20% of the Earth’s oxygen. Yet, the fires that continue to burn the forest to clear it to make room for cattle grazing are so widespread that their plumes of smoke can be seen from outer space. But like the melting of ice shelves in the polar regions and many other situations that are either contributing to or the result of climate change, the Amazon is remote from our everyday life and like the statistics of climate models, is a concept that disempowers those of us who want to make a difference.

There are emerging ideas that might contribute to the kind of realignment of thinking that could enable corporations and individuals to a change of values. In a conversation last week with Kevin Henry of Bazzeo, we spoke about the concept of a Social ROI or Return On Investment. “What if, we asked each other, there was an index that guided companies and consumers to measure the potential social benefit—including sustainability—that projects, products, ventures and other commercial enterprises produced?” What effect would such an expansion of the traditional commercial value expressed by ROI have on the way that people not only invested, but also had on consumer choices? What if we could choose between companies that demonstrated an ROI for their shareholders and one whose SROI showed a commitment to giving something back? Clearly, we need to go beyond Corporate Social Responsibility and the current trends of “greenwashing” and bandwagon effects. It makes me crazy when I see an ad from a major oil corporation showboating what they are doing to improve the environment, alternative energy solutions, and my future.

The concept of Corporate Social Responsibility first appeared in the US several decades ago, but did not truly arrive as a field of management expertise until the turn of the 21st century. Originally, advocates from outside the business sector began pressuring corporations to adhere to more socially conscious principles. In short, the three areas where a need for change in corporate behavior was called for were in its social, economic, and environmental impacts. Recently, a stewardship ethics position has arisen within the business sector in response to CSR. The stewardship ethics orientation seeks to find ways to ensure that profitability and other economic criteria are met by practices that also serve to support social values and is a logical forerunner of SROI.

In today’s global economy, CSR has not experienced anything approaching universal acceptance. In the US, a majority of companies still have given only token acknowledgement of the need to appear socially responsible. No less than the Bible of the capital markets, The Economist, is still critical of stewardship ethics and environmentalism, and remains a steadfast supporter of globalization even in the face of very mixed results in emerging markets and the global meltdown. The conflict between dominant world economic powers and poorer nations continues to grow as the latter resist sustainability, which they view as a luxury that only grown economies can afford.

In another discussion last week with USC, UCLA Professor and Architect, Michael Hricak, he mentioned that the current LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards for sustainable building fall short because they can’t quantify such components of the Green home as natural heating or passive ventilation. This leads to a second opportunity which is to augment such Green standards with those that go beyond the abstraction of carbon credits to innovations that will enable us to quantify nature’s contribution as a market. In other words, what if we placed a monetary value on the trees in the Amazon or the disappearing coral reefs of the world? The creation of a Green Stock Exchange model of valuation for nature would displace our current model which has us on a course set to create nature as a museum in the future.

Mark Hertsgaard first proposed a Global Green Deal in his 1992 book, "Earth Odyssey" and has outlined the plan once again in the March 16 issue of The Nation. He mentions that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Al Gore urged world governments in February to address the global economic crisis with spending that "launches a new green global economy." They noted that channeling Germany, Britain, Japan, and the US's planned $2.25 trillion stimulus in spending into "carbon-based infrastructure and fossil-fuel subsidies would be like investing in subprime real estate all over again."

Sun Tzu, the author of The Art of War, a fifth century B.C. text which became the standard operating manual for Mao Tse Tung’s revolutionary army in the 1940’s as well American business management in the 70’s said: “The considerations of the intelligent always include both benefit and harm.” Arthur C. Clarke said on a similar wavelength: “The proper study of mankind is not merely Man, but Intelligence.”

Looking at the current state of affairs of our environment, it might be better if we pointed the Arecibo receiving dish that is wired to SETI@home in search of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and pointed it back looking for it on Earth. If Earthlings as a species were to receive a cosmic report card, we would certainly merit a “F”. But, we are very small in the cosmic state of things as the Charles and Ray Eames classic short film, Powers of Ten, artfully demonstrates in its portrayal of the voyage from the human microcosm to intergalactic macrocosm and back again to quantum microcosm.

There are scientists like Hans Moravec at Carnegie Mellon who see a future where we will be able to dispense with the natural world altogether and download human consciousness to machines, no longer necessitating the hardware of our bodies. Others like Gerard O’Neil and his kindred spirits forecast Space Colonies and altogether abandoning what Buckminster Fuller called Spaceship Earth. Another scenario, in some riff out of Erik Van Daniken’s “Chariot of the Gods”, has the Space Brothers showing mercy on our little world by coming to save us in the future. The statistics on all of the above occurring in the near future are less likely than the planting of the artificial trees discussed in the New Scientist article about Geoengineering.

Books like Michael A.G. Michaud’s Contact With Alien Civilizations: Our Hopes and Fears About Encountering Extraterrestrials have looked the pros and cons of what we might expect in such an encounter with what might be advanced intelligent or microbial life forms. There have been protocols developed for such an eventuality, but my favorite was tendered from a distinctly unofficial source. As a junior high school student, I worked for several summers in the mailroom of a New York publishing house. I remember that the subject of UFOs came up one day and my brother, Jeff, and I discussed what it would be like with our then mailroom boss, Herb, a brother from Uptown in Harlem. “What would you say to an alien if you met up with one?” I asked. After pondering the question for a moment, Herb’s eyes lit up and he replied matter-of-factly, “I’d just say, ‘what you got for the head?’”

One would hope that if we eventually meet up with an extraterrestrial, that they will see a paradisical home world and resident, conscious species that merit being rewarded by an intergalactic peace pipe and not vaporization.

THE BIG NOTE OR HOW TO APPEASE YOUR LOCAL ANCESTRAL SPIRITS

Words have a strange power over us. Anyone can appreciate this who has been to a Death Metal concert or an opera, major sporting event, heard an orator like Martin Luther King, Jr. or witnessed Tibetan monks chanting “Om Mani Padme Hum”. Though most religious beliefs and scientific theories about the origins of the universe favor light at the beginning, there are some that don’t see, but hear the beginning in the form of the First Sound.

The science of Hindu “mantras” or sounds of power is one living example from the Sanskrit tradition that is thousands of years old. This tradition which also figures in Buddhism is based on the ancient development of certain words, syllables, sounds or groups of word that are distinguished by having the ability to create transformation as tools of power. The respect that the specific use of sound had in these Eastern traditions is no better borne witness to than in the early use of music and sound as a weapon that was regarded as capable of being terminal—a feature, perhaps, that some Death Metal fans secretly wish for.

Marshall McLuhan observed that Hitler’s rise can be attributed in large part not only to the dire economic circumstances of 30’s Germany, but to his absolute command of the radio. Had he lived during the Age of Television, McLuhan points out, his frenzied, frothing at the mouth, mad-eyed delivery wouldn’t have lasted a second.

Given the unique power of sound, it’s no wonder that the notion of its connection to the origin of the cosmos entered the realm of modern music as well. Pete Townshend incorporated the idea at core of The Who’s “Lifehouse” project with the song “Pure and Easy” which proclaimed, “There once was a note, pure and easy…” Maestro and 20th century classical composer, Frank Zappa, was more expansive in his expostulating of “The Big Note” in his early masterwork, “Lumpy Gravy”: "Everything in the universe is ... is ... is made of one element, which is a note, a single note. Atoms are really vibrations, you know, which are extensions of THE BIG NOTE...Everything's one note. Everything—even the ponies. The Note, however, is the ultimate power, but see, the pigs don't know that, the ponies don't know that..."

Zappa continued the dialogue in “A Different Octave” in his “Civilization Phaze III”:

Spider: We are ... actually the same note, but ...
John: But different octave.
Spider: Right. We are 4,928 octaves below the big note.
Monica: Are ya ... are you trying to tell me that ... that this whole universe revolves around one note?
Spider: No, it doesn't revolve around it; that's what it is. It's one note.
Spider: Everybody knows that lights are notes. Light, light, is just a vibration of the note, too. Everything is.
Monica: That one note makes everything else so insignificant.

As a great American satirist and sociologist in the tradition of Lenny Bruce and Robert Crumb, it’s hard to separate Zappa’s work from its milieu and the hippie scene that was often subject of his mordant critique. Still, he also said famously: Remember, Information is not knowledge; Knowledge is not Wisdom; Wisdom is not Beauty, Beauty is not love; Love is not Music; Music is the best.”

Or as Germaine Greer said in a 2005 article in The Guardian, “In Frank's world, every sound had a value, and every action was part of the universal diapason, a colossal vibration that made energy rather than reflecting it.”

In our personal lives—as well as in the world of branding—sound is no more refined and focused than in names. "What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet," says Juliet in Shakespeare’s immortal tragedy of “star-crossed lovers”. Unfortunately, these teenagers are from warring families, and she is telling poor Romeo that their family names don’t amount to a hill of beans compared with their love for one another. But, names do matter and harshly as they were to find out by play’s end. Fast forwarding to the 21st century, history surrounds us no matter where we live in the place names that we often ignore or are oblivious to. Names are key to understanding not only because they provide a clue to our own identity as individuals, but because place names can provide us a better sense of who we are by locating us in time and space.

After I first moved to LA, one of the things that amazed me was how close history was just in the passing freeway signs that beckoned in English, Spanish, and sometimes odd names like Malibu, Cahuenga, Azusa, and Cucamonga. Curious, I started trying to locate old maps and records to trace names that had this distinctly non-European flavor to them. I mean, growing up in New York, I knew that Manhattan was named after a tribe called the Mannahatta and that Wall Street was named after…well, the wall of a fort. But, maybe it’s just all the tall buildings and pavement that seem to have removed the past so entirely from the landscape—though there is now an interesting project called surprisingly enough, The Mannahatta Project, that was recently profiled in the New Yorker, and is recreating what the New York Island looked like prior to contact by Europeans.

But, it was so easy to squint my eyes somehow in the San Fernando Valley and look at the mountains, washes, and hillsides still intermittently decorated by chaparral and imagine what it was like only a century or less ago. History is close here relative to the Old World. The last full-blooded Chumash Indians died in the Santa Barbara area around 1900. I have a photo of an Indian village in Riverside (which is about half an hour from my house), that dates as recently as 1920. I say “recently” even though it’s almost 90 years ago, but the past seems more present here to me for some reason. Perhaps it’s just that Hollywood has made its mark by adding more ghosts even if they are frozen by artificial light to add a layer to the ancestral spirits and ghosts of the conquistadors, padres, prospectors, cattlemen, and railroad barons that seem to lie rustling just under the cover of the Santa Ana winds and coastal morning fogs. And I guess it was one of those coastal names that started a fascination and study that has lasted to this day with the Chumash people who lived here. I got hold of a Rosetta stone of sorts in the form of notes from an anthropologist named John Peabody Harrington who logged place names and other priceless ethnographic data from the few surviving Chumash during the early part of the 20th century. One such location was “Humaliwo” which in the original language meant to describe the place “where the surf crashes loudly”, a fact that would be appreciated by surfers at the same approximate location where 3000 villagers lived known today as “Malibu”.

The Chumash Indians of Southern California were extraordinary in many ways. They had the only ocean-going canoes in the Western hemisphere outside of the peoples of the Northwest Coast of the continent. They had a working knowledge of astronomy, a complex social system, trading culture, and were world class artists as evidenced by the rock art that still lies hidden to amaze the lucky beholder in sandstone outcrops, caves, and other secret places in their territory between Malibu and Morro Bay.

The Chumash believed that dolphins, a close aquatic relation of the porpoise, were guardian spirits who literally served to hold up the world. It’s no wonder that the Hollywood film industry found its center here for what better description of the artist? The dolphins accomplished this feat by swimming around the earth and weaving a web of salty spray in their looping up-and-down motion between the worlds of ocean and air.

According to local Indian legend, sympathetic spirit beings took pity on the lonely dwellers of the ancient Channel Islands and built a rainbow bridge to the mainland, thereby making way for the first pilgrimage of humans. Unfortunately, not all the humans in this exodus were able to maintain their balance on the bridge of colors; those were the “unlucky ones” who tumbled off before reaching land and transformed into dolphins when they hit the wild currents below.

Today, a curious vernacular adoption of the word “porpoise” employs the term as a verb to illustrate an up-and-down motion similar to the movement of these aquatic mammals. This particular usage is meant to describe periodicity in the life cycle of human beings, societies and even corporations. In this perspective, one’s life “porpoises” as we navigate the highs of comedy and lows or “slings and arrows” of tragedy. One role of drama and the arts is to provide human beings with a method to penetrate this mysterious cycle of time, and to create the absolute that is possible in the moment that time stops and we are part of the whole. “Porpoise” then can become twisted as a sound alike like a Marx Bros. routine to suit our agenda here to mean “purpose” at this intersection where the creative act defines space and time.

It is not recorded whether dolphins or porpoises accompanied the first European explorers who first sighted the area now known as Greater Los Angeles. What is known is that these earliest explorers who were part of the Spanish Cabrillo Expedition in 1542, recorded on Sunday, October 8, their arrival at “the mainland in a large bay” (most likely Los Alamitos or San Pedro Bay) which they named “Baia de los Fumos” or “the Bay of Smokes”. This namesake was given to commemorate the haze that even then covered the landscape in an unreal, mysterious curtain comprised of vapors from campfires of the several dozen Indian villages that dotted the region as far as the eye could see. On the approximate site of one these villages (belonging to the Gabrielino or as they called themselves, the Tongva or “people”), and immortalized in old maps of the desert padres as the town of “Puvungna”, now sits the sprawling campus of California State University at Long Beach.

Though the record of what the village name means is shrouded in haze like the Bay of Smokes, it said to have an association with the word for “crowd”. We do know that the suffix, “gna” means “place of”, for example, as used in other Los Angeles area place names like “Cahuenga” --“place of the mountain”--or “Tujunga” --“place of the owl.” Even so, if Puvungna or “the place where crowds gather” is of uncertain province, it is still regarded as the most significant village documented by one of the most famous missionaries, Father Boscana.

The village of “Puvu” or Puvungna was known as the place where, according to Tongva legend, a great gathering took place to commemorate the creation myth of these local Coastal Shoshonean people. It is said that so many people would show up to the council from afar, that they would have to sleep outside the village limits, keeping warm by crowding together “in a ball.”

Father Boscana documented the shamanic religion of the local Indians in dramatic detail and drew parallels between the Tongva Creation myth and Genesis, citing similarities in their descriptions of the formation of the elements. Other sources have spoken about links between the Tongva narrative and Greek creation story as related by Hesiod, where the archaic Greeks, like the Tongva ancestors, were “acorn eaters” and animals who could talk and came out of the darkness. So, in the same place that ancient ancestors celebrated their stories of creation, the Academy now stands.

California poet Robinson Jeffers’ poem “Hands” memorializes an Indian rock art site deep in the Ventana Wilderness near Big Sur where a ceremonial cave is decorated with several hundred white handprints. He describes the aboriginal artists as speaking to us through time: “Look: we also are human; we had hands, not paws. All hail you people with the cleverer hands, our supplanters in the beautiful country; enjoy her a season, her beauty, and come down and be supplanted, for you also are human.”

Tribal peoples recount that the ancestral spirits are pleased when they hear song and witness the dancing and dramatic performances of human beings who still wear bodies. Our hands differentiate us from the four-leggeds. We are described in dated anthropological texts as “man the tool maker.” When we use our hands to create art, music, dance and poetry, we recreate the world. We also have the opportunity to consciously pay homage to those who came before. If our lives are creative, then we can be driven by a purpose that honors the spirits of Puvungna, now known as Cal State, Long Beach or Yangna, as the place now known as the City of Los Angeles was called by the people who lived her first. For in all of these places, the creation story is ongoing.

According to ethnographic sources, there is now a worldwide crisis of native languages going extinct. Linguist Michael Krauss who has dedicated his career to making the public aware of how language is threatened, estimates that the number of oral languages assured of being around by 2100 is 600 or just 10% of the present number. He further cites that about half of the 6,000 languages spoken on earth today are “moribund” a status due to the fact that “they are spoken only by adults who no longer teach them to the next generation.” The loss of a language is as catastrophic as the disappearance of a species. With it, we lose a piece of the whole.

Like the ancient Indian languages that are disappearing with the death of elders who are often the only remaining speakers, there are many place names whose meaning is now completely lost in time. So, one purpose that we can find in our lives, then, is to define meaning once again for these places by making sure that we amuse, engage and serve the spirits who were here first. Only then, is there the possibility that they will take pity on us and return the gesture by answering with inspiration to light our unique moment in time.

WHO OWNS THE AIR?

The current “meltdown” as it is euphemistically labeled goes deeper than money and is really a question of values. As a recent article in The Economist called “Diagnosing Depression” said, “The word ‘depression’ is popping up more often than at any time in the past 60 years, but what exactly does it mean?”

There are two main criteria it cites from an Internet based search that differentiate a depression from recession—a depression involves a decline in real GDP that exceeds 10% and/or is a recession that lasts longer than three years. The Great Depression qualified on both counts with GDP falling by approximately 30% between 1929 and 1933. While there may not be apple stands out on every street corner yet, soup lines have been expanding at a rate that may parallel the two banks that the FDIC is now seizing weekly.

Karl Marx, not a man known nearly for humor as say the American comedy team sharing his namesake, may be at least sporting a rictus smile as he spins in his grave. If we are at the beginning of a depression, it will certainly merit the name Depression 2.0 because like the financial engineered debacle we are drowning in, it will be distinguished by a feature set uniquely its own. Technicalities and definitions aside, the current global economic crisis is also as much about the nature of meaning or what might be called by “the meaning of meaning” as it is about values.

Nowhere is this better showcased than in Bernard Madoff’s ability to hide an unparalleled scam while avoiding oversight detection—amazingly even without a single trade for a decade and with a professed 10% return annually—behind a supposedly “proprietary system” he called “split-strike conversions”, which he obstinately refused to define when pressed by the curious. According to April’s Wired and Greg Hays, whose firm Hays Financial Consulting specializes in fraud detection, this critical element of how to run a scam can be summed up as, “There’s usually some cryptic angle.”

Mike Olson of Wired likens this approach to the kind of “marketing scams (that) often push products with secret compounds that say, “triple muscle mass, hair thickness, and brain cells.” Like it or not, Wall Street is now firmly situated in the realm of P.T. Barnum. The New York Times has recently gone so far in two articles to call the “performance bonuses” and “management fees” received by senior banking executives as “looting”. With AIG currently defending its post-bailout executive bonuses and with what the LA Times called the “grudging consent” of the Obama Administration, we clearly are looking at a divide in perspectives, if not values. There seems to be a semantic gap here between “bonus” and “theft” the size of a Black Hole.

The form that this maze of mirrors takes is nor more transparent than with the arcana of derivatives, credit default swaps, and other financial instruments that were developed by the financial engineers or as they came to be affectionately known “quants” starting in the 80’s. Like the equations they are founded on, notably David K. Li’s Gaussian copula function first published in 2000, these values are all theoretical “windows” with often what are only secondary or tertiary relationships to “the store” or collateral. When even “the experts” have professed to not understand these concepts, then we are in the realm of talking heads on CNBC, Bloomberg, and the Sunday morning network “political” talk shows nodding like bobble heads in the back of a repossessed American car being towed away into the sunset. Even a worthy on the frontlines like Elizabeth Warner of Harvard Law School and Head of the Congressional Oversight Panel on TARP offered to Terry Gross last week on Fresh Air that nobody knows yet where the bailout money has gone, but that the process of transparency has started. At this point, the vastness of the numbers involved now that they are in the multiple trillions are just plain numbing since there is no way for we non-quants to reference them.

As the crisis continues to reveal layers of the onion and falls like so many cards in the Wall Street Funhouse, it’s these kinds of expressions of “value” that are a long way from a monetary system based on the gold standard backed up by bullion at Fort Knox and Bretton Woods. We’re way beyond something that Auric Goldfinger would lust for here and the depths of how far the cards will fall can only be described as an endless maze where we’ve just wiped our dung-soiled shoes off on the welcome mat to Wall Street’s House of Mirrors attraction.

So, if the financial basis for the system has now proven shoddy, if not shaken to its core by virtue of not being based on any reality except for greed and probability formulas—both shaky as foundations at best—what then, is the reality we find ourselves in? Psychotherapist Robert J. Sardello and Randolph Severson in a masterwork called Money and the Soul of the World (a phrase coined by Norman O. Brown), provide a clear picture of how we got here: “Bottom line thinking makes money appear as the one solid reality left…money is the epistemology of our Age. Money makes things happen. It is the source of action in the world and perhaps the only power we invest in. Life seems to depend on it…Perhaps in every other respect, in every other value, bankruptcy has been declared giving money the power of some sacred deity, demanding to be recognized. Economics no longer persuades money how to behave. Numbers cannot make the beast lie down and be quiet or sit up and do tricks. Thus, as we suspected all along, economics falsely imitates science. At best, economics is a neurosis of money…it enables functioning in the world, and before long all functioning revolves around maintaining the neurosis.”

Maybe it can be argued that this is a Western neurosis and that a billion Muslims would not subscribe to this apostasy. But we’re not alone—in February, the nation once held as the standard for emerging economies of this century—Dubai—received an initial bail-out of $10 billion from the U.A.E. The crisis of values is clearly a global affair. Or maybe, as Tom Tomorrow mordantly observes in his most recent column in This Modern World, the “current turmoil” is based on the fact that “Tax cuts for the wealthy have never been properly implemented!” His current post features a cover for a periodical called "The Magazine of Wall Street" from July 27, 1929 with the headline "Ten Best Stocks To Buy Now" and Tom's caption, "Little did they know..."

This past week, I was talking with Kevin Henry of Bazzeo, who has been an active voice in the environmental movement since 1974. As an early mover, he has now become a recognized arbiter of style, taste and innovation in the Green Home and especially the kitchen. We were discussing the history of how environmentalism has changed and in particular, how it’s experienced a sea-change in the last five years, in large part due to An Inconvenient Truth taking global warming into the mainstream.

We were discussing corporate “greenwashing” and the bandwagon effect, but Kevin elevated the conversation from my cynicism to his always infectious optimism. He said: “We’ve gone from consumers saying, ‘I’ve got to have that!’ to saying, “Why do I need that?’” Simply put, he spoke to a movement that is the subject of forthcoming lectures called "Consumerism To Consciousness".

This theme is at the root of our current economic crisis and holds the key to recovery. Weather expert and anthroposophical scholar, Dennis Klocek, has taken James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, which posited the planet as a living entity one step further. Klocek offers a formula which advances that the Earth’s consciousness is directly equivalent during any given historical epoch to the level of human species consciousness. Or to put it another way, E∞=H∞/C (E=Earth, H=Homo sapiens, ∞=Consciousness, C=Time). It follows that the sooner we continue of our own volition—rather than as forced by economic disaster—on the path of course correction toward deeper values connected to the whole—the better our future will be.

To survive this crisis of what stands behind value, it is common sense to base our currency on the living system we all share and should sustain together. It’s not a gesture like cap and trade toward substantiating the market value of the natural world that we need now, though to value nature as the market is the right direction. But we need to be careful for as Chief Seattle once asked rhetorically and with some irony of the Great White Father in Washington: “Who owns the air?” A Green WPA, however, would be a great leap forward to start rebuilding our infrastructure and manufacturing around sustainability and renewable energy.

To inspire hope and start on the road to a new earth economy, we will need many more living, breathing formulas like Klocek’s to replace the vampire quant formulas of Wall Street—but Klocek’s equation is a miraculous, bold and auspicious way to formulate an Earth Standard to a eco-system of organic values based on every breath we take…

IT'S A SHORT FORM WORLD AFTER ALL

My eight-year-old son recently asked me when I started seeing in color. We were watching a black and white TV show on cable and had been talking about what some of my favorite shows were when I was growing up. This wasn’t my first close encounter with my children’s incredulity at my media shortcomings. Past incidents have included their disbelief that I grew up without videotape and DVDs. Vinyl recordings were also a revelation when I pulled some albums from my secret stash out of the garage and gently placed them on the altar of a new turntable.

Artifactual media can be a curio if not hold a talismanic power over newcomers. Sometimes new generations are beaten into submission through accidents of discovery or inter-generational wars of attrition. A major victory in my personal campaign in support of archaic media occurred last week when my teenager asked for advice on how to properly handle her new vinyl acquisition—an MGMT record. It was almost a cultural breakthrough until it was marred when I had to transfer the record to a digital file because my son had used my new record player to do some scratching—only without the benefit of having a disc on the turntable, thus shredding another hard-to-find needle and rubber platon.

When generational media worlds collide, minds are blown. In my case, I was captivated by my son’s perspective that before the advent of color televisions and what NBC called “living color”, we would all obviously only be seeing the world in black and white. Looking at the Wall Street quants maze of arcane derivatives and other financial instruments, I sometimes wish the world could still be deciphered in black and white. But what is interesting about my son’s comment is that we all seem to take the media we grow up with for granted.

There is now a generation that did not know life without the Internet and mass game changers like the iPhone and Wii. More important it seems than changes in technology and distribution are the generational shifts that change the way consumers use media. It also leads to questions about where the mass market and Main Street have gone and a conversation I had last week with the most brilliant marketer I know.

Fred Seibert is a self-proclaimed “serial entrepreneur” who among other things was largely responsible for branding MTV and currently has several of the top-rated animated TV shows. But, I don’t hold any of that against him especially since these accomplishments don’t always mean that he’s always right—even though visitors to his old office were warned by a large sign that they best leave their opinions outside the door because the person they would find inside was infallible.

Still, like the agent provocateur he is, Fred said, “The methodology to reach the mass market no longer exists.” Now, maybe I’m taking his observation out of context for the sake of this post, so I duly note that his comment originated with respect to the state of the music industry. But, we were also talking about how the television business was bound to follow suit sooner or later.

When I was watching an old episode of “The Honeymooners” on TV Land recently, the difference between the world of the long form, mass market universe of yesteryear and today’s short form, micro media markets was brought into high relief. The scene featuring a typical argument between Jackie Gleason and Audrey Meadows lasted for almost two minutes without interruption and only used one wide shot. The relationship of early television with stage performances is clear when watching this series as well as other fifties classics like “The Jack Benny Program” and “Amos and Andy”. It’s no accident that live drama like CBS’ “Playhouse 90” made up a lot of 50’s TV fare.

In the 60’s, television scenes got shorter, influenced most likely by the tempo of rock and roll. With the introduction of MTV in the early 80’s, quick cutting and handheld techniques became the order of the day and “scenes” lasted a matter of seconds, serving up music cuts instead of video edits, and in turn, influencing highly stylized, network TV series like “Miami Vice”. Media critic and sci-fi writer, Paul Levinson, has offered a granular look in Digital McLuhan of the dwindling length of scenes for small screen time from earliest television through the 90’s. He also notes that, in a reversal of fortunes that Marshall McLuhan would have appreciated, many movies in the last two decades are remakes of classic TV shows—so many so, in my view, that one wonders how many are left to dredge up in the archives. As Frank Zappa once said to me, “The world will end in nostalgia”.

Last year’s introduction of long form downloads of its primetime hour dramas by ABC displayed a fascinating metric—Nielsen Digital measured that there were some 40 million total downloads. But, the average time viewed was—guess what? Three minutes. The consummation of this sea change movement to short form was realized with the one-second Miller High Life commercial in this year’s Super Bowl. At $3 million per 30-second spot, it was also a relative bargain.

Still, Fox’s American Idol is still reaching what is undeniably a huge mass audience even when compared with the former power of top-rated shows from broadcast TV’s height such as “MASH”, “Cosby” and “Seinfeld”, which characteristically reached scores of millions of TV viewers. According to Entertainment Weekly, last Thursday’s Idol show attracted 21.2 million viewers beating Survivor’s 12 million. If I’m a consumer brand trying to reach a mass market, then even a portion of the total TV universe on any given night still represents a viable methodology compared to the short form universe of the Internet. However, television advertising has never been proven to have a direct correspondence between commercials and purchase. In the television business, it’s all about growing brand awareness. Even so, Short Attention Span Theater has arrived even as just a relatively unmonetized consumer trend. While YouTube’s valuation is $1.5billion, its 2008 revenues were $150million, a paltry sum compared with the $65 billion TV ad business.

Despite this stark earnings contrast, Cynthia Turner reports in that the overall Internet video audience is now 135 million strong. But, a growing share of audience isn’t necessarily market share. It isn’t a question of size that matters, but of how this new online video medium works as discrete from others. Largely as a result of the Obama Inaugural, YouTube was up after a flat December to 5.86 billion video streams in January with over 100m uniques. Paidcontent.org reported a week ago that Yahoo, MySpace, MTV.com, and YouTube are all considering eventual upgrades to HD as a way to keep up with broadcast. But, the question presented by mass media is not a matter of how many streams but where is the mainstream? And what matters is not necessarily how people are watching at any given time, and not even what they are watching, but how and for how long?

Appointment, scheduled viewing was the original standard for broadcast television. Video and cable chipped away at this model, but it was the Internet and personalization that finally did it in. TV is literally background to my daughter’s generation and a complement to other multitasked media input. In the on demand, VOD, PVR, short form universe, video consumption is not tied to time in the same way that hit TV shows once defined an evening when families had to sit down together in front of the pixel campfire to catch their favorite show—or else miss it entirely.

Even though CBS’s March Madness is nearly sold out for online ads, it is unclear how the short form universe is reaching users in a meaningful way. Short form video may have the eventual power of narrowing the focus to very specific demographics. Consumer viewing habits will continue to morph. In a recent piece, Phil Swann asks whether Blockbuster will go away. Maybe, but my answer to Fred’s question is that TV is still the methodology to reach the mass market.

Audience share is transformed with the introduction of every new visual medium. But each medium has its own value proposition and attendant feature set that can vary in differentiation from others with respect to process and content. But movies didn’t replace radio and TV didn’t replace radio—and the Internet didn’t replace TV. The introduction of a new medium doesn’t replace extant forms, but displaces them by defining new audiences as well as cannibalizing old ones—and their power to do so is always based on how they increase value for the consumer.

The bigger question is what impact the generational shift of video consumers who have grown up in the short form universe will have on making the video stream the standard and long form an occasional luxury seen at the movies or as PVR saved fare of five or ten minute shows on future integrated online and offline "broadcast" networks. But in concentrating on the expanding video web, we are looking in the wrong direction. My prediction is that it’s going to be the mobile video web that is the definitive, disruptive platform to watch. Whatever happens, one thing is sure—it’s already a short form world after all and our children will inevitably be faced with tough questions from their own kids who won’t believe them when they roll out their saved iTunes playlists and talk about how cool HD and iPhones were.