{"id":49204,"date":"2016-03-11T06:53:21","date_gmt":"2016-03-11T06:53:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=49204"},"modified":"2016-03-11T06:53:21","modified_gmt":"2016-03-11T06:53:21","slug":"contrapuntal-video-fugal-braiding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=49204","title":{"rendered":"Contrapuntal video, fugal braiding"},"content":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron<\/strong> — from Trumpery to Altman’s Nashville<\/em> ]
\n.<\/p>\n


\nTufte’<\/strong>s illustration of the Kathasaritsagara<\/em> or Ocean of the Streams of Story<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

**<\/p>\n

Wired<\/strong> had a piece titled Never Mind Trump. The Internet Wants to Watch What\u2019s Behind Him<\/a> a couple of days ago, and it contained a sentence that caught my attention:<\/p>\n

Like a Bach fugue, the counterpoint rivaled, and then overtook, the original melody.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

**<\/p>\n

I’m always interested in non-musical forms of counterpoint, whether we’re talking Glenn Gould<\/strong>‘s radio dramas<\/a>, Claude Levi-Strauss<\/strong>‘s structure for his Mytholoogiques<\/a>, Tufte<\/strong>‘s Rushdie<\/strong>‘s Kathasaritsagara<\/em>, or the various attempts to make Hermann Hesse<\/strong>‘s Glass Bead Game<\/em> playable. Hesse himself invokes both fugue<\/strong> and counterpoint<\/strong> in the passage in which he describes actual moves in his game about as clearly as anywhere:<\/p>\n

A Game, for example, might start from a given astronomical configuration, or from the actual theme of a Bach fugue, or from a sentence out of Leibniz or the Upanishads, and from this theme, depending on the intentions and talents of the player, it could either further explore and elaborate the initial motif or else enrich its expressiveness by allusions to kindred concepts. Beginners learned how to establish parallels, by means of the Game’s symbols, between a piece of classical music and the formula for some law of nature. Experts and Masters of the Game freely wove the initial theme into unlimited combinations. For a long time one school of players favored the technique of stating ide by side, developing in counterpoint, and finally harmoniously ombining two hostile themes or ideas, such as law and freedom, individual and community. In such a Game the goal was to develop both themes or theses with complete equality and impartiality, to
\nevolve out of thesis and antithesis the purest possible synthesis. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

**<\/p>\n

I was accordingly interested to read this paragraph, ending as it does with the sentence I quoted above:<\/p>\n

The Christie videos were just the latest installment in what might be the defining video format of this election. Call it marginal media, in which background activity overwhelms the intended subject. Most candidates have found themselves inadvertently sidelined at some point. Hillary Clinton was overshadowed by the surreal stylings of \u201cSticker Kid,\u201d who mugged, jerked, and danced throughout her stump speech. Another short video treated Bernie Sanders\u2019 endorsement of marijuana decriminalization as a preamble to an audience member\u2019s startled reaction. Another Trump rally was undercut when a member of the crowd behind the lectern began reading a copy of Claudia Rankine\u2019s Citizen. The drama unfolded over the course of Trump\u2019s speech, as the reader\u2019s neighbors began to argue with her, then brought their neighbors into the fray. Soon, the tension made it impossible to pay attention to Trump at all. Like a Bach fugue, the counterpoint rivaled, and then overtook, the original melody.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

**<\/p>\n

We need, it seems to me, to get used to thinking contrapuntally — and accordingly it is instructive to see just how many of the great artists of recent times have employed some measure of contrapuntal thinking in their work. From the same Wired piece:<\/p>\n

The frames of Robert Altman\u2019s Nashville<\/em> are packed with overlapping dialogue and activity\u2014it\u2019s often hard to determine which storyline should dominate\u2014granting his aspiring losers the same weight as the country-music superstars they idolize. Tom Stoppard applied the same lens to Hamlet<\/em> when he made two lackeys — whose off-stage death was barely remarked upon in Shakespeare\u2019s play — the heroes of his fan-fic spin-off, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Okay, I’m off to see Nashville<\/em> if I can find it..<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron — from Trumpery to Altman’s Nashville ] . Tufte’s illustration of the Kathasaritsagara or Ocean of the Streams of Story ** Wired had a piece titled Never Mind Trump. The Internet Wants to Watch What\u2019s Behind Him a couple of days ago, and it contained a sentence that caught my attention: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[191,837,526,645,1314,415,529,912,67,480,1,235],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-bach","category-charles-cameron","category-counterpoint","category-donald-trump","category-elections","category-games","category-glass-bead-game-2","category-movies","category-music","category-uncategorized","category-wired"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49204"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49209,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49204\/revisions\/49209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}