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to go a little further with what the other rb said above---have you ever played with an audio software like protools or audacity? you can load a recorded sound and the platform shows you a map of it from the wave-form and timbre viewpoint. you can also change the time-scale that you're working with, but the change in scale doesn't mean that your browser changes size--so you can see the track as, say, 4 minutes or you can see it in 1/10th of a second intervals and there's a sense in which they both look the same (alot of times the visual of zooming in on an time-interval registers as blowing up the waveforms, but you can control for that)--it's really easy to find yourself wandering about in the complexities of fractions of a second's worth of sound...you can built pieces from units made up of these tiny intervals and generate all kinds of complexity that folk will not quite hear but will not quie not hear when you run the piece in a more "normal" time-scale.
what lets you subdivide the normal time-scale of hearing (to continue with this) is the software---in the normal course of hearing/listening, intervals of a 1/10th of a second are "there" but we usually hear in patterns that are quite a lot longer than that, so functionally they are "there" but not necessarily "present" if you see what i mean.
the reason i mention all this is that not only are these people who are running for major domo of the oligarchy subject to amazing amount of television attention, but the technology itself has effects on how you think about what you're seeing. you can make loops of fottage of anyone saying something stupid or that sounds stupid and repeat it again and again until that's all you see. just as you could in principle dissolve a sentence that you are saying into a series of disconnected-seming 1/10th of a second sound intervals or you could, while walking, also be laced (in principle) under a microscope so that you would be simultaneously walking on one scale and be a space between molecules on another--in the latter instance, you'd still be walking as before, but the viewpoint defined by the microscope would exclude all but a space between adjacent molecules in a particular quadrant of your body.
tv bothers me alot in that it is a continuous stream of discontinuous scales of information---for example (another one) the little trainwreck that was sarah palin's attempt to answer a question about mc-cain from that heavyweight tv interviewer katie couric takes up about the same amount of time, in terms of footage, as sequences you might see on the invasion of georgia or the conflicts that have been unfolding between the united states and pakistan over american cross-border raids. the entirely trivial and the very large are made equal in terms of scale and are presented within a continuum of information homogenized in the same way. at any given point, you can decide to interrupt this flow by choosing to play loops of particular intereactions or segments of interactions over and over again, so that a space of 3 sentences can come to occupy the same time-scale as a war far away.
and because this is a possibility that's always available thanks to the way in which television packages infotainment, it's difficult to maintain a sense of perspective--and i think this holds for most of us---and very small things can and generally are made into very big things and very big things into small things.
what holds all this chaos together is ourselves, sitting in chairs.
this seems to me the most heavily tv mediated campaign i can remember, maybe because everyone, everywhere sees in the bush administration a kind of wreck and the folk in televisionland maybe see in that a chance to ramp up their importance by focusing on the rituals of transition for "us" so that we don't have to make any of these pesky choices about where to direct our attention, and then runs that through its usual kaleidoscope machinery, and so we find ourselves, sitting in chairs.
it's all very odd.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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