Can You Hear Me, Dr. Wu?

Authors: Walter Becker, Donald Fagen
Artists: Steely Dan
Album: Katy Lied
Song: Dr. Wu

Doctor Wu appears to be a song about a somehow betrayed loser talking or wanting to whine to a mysterious shrink, who perhaps might be also the one who has stolen the girl. It features a very much standard Steely Dan capture of the truth in emotional moments: "All night long, we would sing this stupid song, and every word we sang I knew was true."

As to the identity of this Dr. Wu, in various interviews Steely Dan have claimed he's a thoroughly fictional character, with Donald Fagen explaining, "We change the names to protect the innocent." The truly innocent indeed need to be protected, in the arts as everywhere else.

The album which took its name from a line in this song is the fourth and the first pure Dan studio album after they had stopped touring. It was originally released in 1975 by ABC Records, went gold and peaked at #13 on the US charts. That's about how it was with the Dan in the 70ies.

The "Cuban gentleman" lines came to my mind in 2008 when my choir spent some quality time in South Florida and our bus passed by Biscayne Bay more than one time. Thanks to miniature hard disks in diminutive Hardware after singing the song for two friends I was able to also play it to them.

If you ask yourself what's so very "jewish" about this song, ask again. There might be an easy answer.

The Song

Katy tried, I was halfway crucified,
I was on the other side of no tomorrow.
You walked in, and my life began again
just when I'd spent the last piaster I could borrow.
All night long we would sing that stupid song,
And every word we sang I knew was true.

Are you with me Doctor Wu,
Are you really just a shadow of the man that I once knew?
Are you crazy, are you high or just an ordinary guy?
Have you done all you can do, are you with me Doctor?

Don't seem right, I've been strung out here all night
I've been waiting for the taste you said you'd bring to me.
Biscayne Bay where the Cuban gentlemen sleep all day
I went searching for the song you used to sing to me.
Katy lies, you can see it in her eyes,
But imagine my surprise when I saw you.

Are you with me Doctor Wu
Are you really just a shadow of the man that I once knew?
She is lovely yes she's sly and you're an ordinary guy.
Has she finally got to you, can you hear me Doctor?
Are you with me Doctor, can your hear me Doctor?
Are you ...

The adress

Dr. Wu, man, you did not post in a long time, maybe you need some med yourself. Well, here it comes, with Edelweiss-Extract and everything: hola hola hola!

And Now For Something Completely Different

Natürlich können nicht einmal Gloria Estefan und Celia Cruz mir meine schlechte Laune verderben, die angesichts des ökonomischen, geistigen und moralischen Zustandes unserer Welt ja wohl auch mehr als gerechtfertigt ist.

Aber der Schmerz lässt im Schatten unter Palmen nach einem köstlichen Piña Colada bzw. Gin Fizz und mit einem einfachen Gerät zur Musikwiedergabe bei milden 24 Grad einfach ziemlich nach.

Media, Hot & Cool - Application of Hot and Cool

Now after the introductory installment, it is time to get a tad bit more serious and methodical.

Educational Intention

In McLuhan's mind the usage of vague terms terms like "hot & cool" is not arbitrary. He firmly believed that Francis Bacon, Viscount St.Alban's was very right when he wrote the following.

Aphorisms, representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to inquire further; whereas methods, carrying the show of a total, do secure men, as if they were at furthest. F. Bacon, The Proficience and Advancement of Learning, 1605, Book 2, XI–XX, p. 5, quotation CP-ed from wikiquote, derived from P. Marchand's The Medium and the Messenger, p.65

We could see Marshal McLuhan as a forerunner to postmodernism and its unbelief in scientic completeness and universality. We also tend to share a certain trust in the power of elliptical analytic patterns, though stay sceptical of some of the ensuing results of that further inquiry.

A large corpus of aphoristic "wisdom" literature has furthered question formulation, problem disection and holistic reintegration in our own endeavours of learning. Aphoristic joking is actively encouraged during extended tinytalk plc. analytic sessions.

On the other hand aphoristic thinking, questioning and reintegration has led to much nonsense as best exemplified by analytical talents such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche who get hilarious at best and really painfully embarassing when they start to jump to conclusions with their incomplete and unbalanced sets of perceptions. As did Aristotle, Platon, St.Augustine and Descartes most of the time, to name but a few.

Be all of that as it may, we should keep in mind that these metaphoric terms are meant to provoke more questions and answers and leave the field open instead of tying it down in a precise way. But still, they should "mean" something and have a descriptive and structural use.

Application by McLuhan and our Interpretation

The 2nd chapter of Part I of "Understanding Media - The Extensions of Man, McGraw Hill, NY is entitled "Media Hot and Cold".

First, the concept of "hot" media and its effects are exemplified in a parapgraph about Viennese Waltz.

The first sentence in the next parapgraphs then contrasts media using the 2 terms together. It reads: "There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like the radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV", op.cit, p.22, so with

• hot radio - cool telephone
• hot film - cool television

what we have is a quadruple figure (not uncharacteristic for McLuhan) with more than one dual symmetries.

We believe it was Jazz music - already mentioned earlier and in conjecture with waltz - that delivered the template for the pair and also brought about the switch from the "cold" of the chapters title to "cool" the text's "hot and cool media".

We get confirmation of this hypothesis when we read on: The jazz of the period of the hot new media of movie and radio was hot jazz. Yet jazz of itself tends to be a casual dialogue form of dance quite lacking the repetitive and mechanical forms of the waltz. Cool jazz came in quite naturally after the first impact of radio and movie had been absorbed. (p.27)

Do not oversee this: In the days we talk about, despite what trios and quartets and big bands had already achieved in avantgardisation and the concert hall, jazz music then was not the artificial form it is today but still was predominantly popular dance music.

From the above and as an aside we can also conclude that, like Prof. Adorno in America and later in Germany, Prof. McLuhan might not have been that genuinely interested in jazz music other than as a model for watching and deriving structures from dancing movement and hence aligning expressions of souls and bodies into his ongoing reasoning. Sometimes a certain distance might help perspective.

Continueing to use the 10 and 1/2 pages of "Understanding Media"s chapter 2, we run into ever more incomplete definitions, partial abstractions and a mix of examples, some supported by ancient authority and others not.

We are confronted with tribal and feudal hierarchy, speedup, the mechanical, perception of space and time, allusions to Prof. Harold Innis and his "empires", "high definition" and "low definition", expression like "low and high participation" and the pattern of reversal.

In terms of the theme of media hot and cold, backward countries are cool, and we are hot. The "city slicker" ist hot, and the rustic is cool. But in the terms of the reversal of procedures and values in the electric age, the past mechanical time was hot, and we of the TV age are cool.

Now if you really allowed for involvement and participation your attention might be drawn to the idea of simultaneity - used with a different meaning elsewhere - and turn it from its toes to stand on its head.

Chapter 2 is followed up by chapter 3 "Reversal of the overheated medium" which is the first hint that there are cracks and ways out of the cemented square of film, telephone, radio and TVNow maybe we find ourselves able to start to appreciate the vertical nature of hot & cold.

(Un)conscious secondary intentions

The easy question here always is, who was it that the protagonist wants to be attractive for and cannot afford to admit? The more difficult question is mostly, what was it that guided our own picking this or picking that. Biographical or autobiographical knowledge may help this or may not. 1 rule or 2, taken thoroughly seriously go a long way in overcoming the dilemma:

1. Never stop asking the next question! (and then, the but)
2. Turn everything inside out! (as in you as the outside and the outside as the subject e.g.)

In the end it does not matter a lot who Marshal McLuhan wanted to be popular with. Recognizable yearning for feedback and appreciation can be miserable indeed, but never is anymore for the deceased and departed. Approval from his superego and the procedure of self<-value() is for the living. Whoever likes to use the life of the author as a straight or distortion mirror, be our guests, nevertheless.

A Problem of Application and an Example

Most problems that arise with "aphoristic inquiry hooking" probably stem from uncontrollable changes in paradigmatic and syntagmatic connections (or "metaphoric and metonymic touch and similarity" as the poetry teachers would say or "les voies de déplacement et compactage" as Freudian reconstructivists would say) and arbitrary changes in neighboring signification. These changes can achieve a lot in obscuring just about everything that was meant and felt at compile time. Translation definitely does not help in this respect. Only thorough and prolonged study helps, or a leap of faith, now and then.

If we might look at a radical example: facination with but also many rows on any even half plausible interpretation of the Dao De Ching stems from exactly this elusiveness of moving grammatical patterns and structures based on what we used to call the arbitrariness of the signifier.

Funnily, this most aphoristic of aphoristic world knowledge collections gets no mention in western indoeuropean editions of the wikipedia article on aphorism, of which we checked the English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Latin versions. As regretfully we do not master a single non ie. language, not even hebrew, ancient or modern, we were and are not able to check those, but would consider reference in the chinese and nipponese version probable.)

We have to seriously consider that the forms of touch that these terms - hot, cool, village, global and so on felt differently and were connected differently in the brains of, say, '64, '74, '84, '94, '04 and '14. Provided, we keep this in mind, these terms can still stimulate and encourage further inquiry that may yet produce new insight and provide guidance on our long chosen ways to understanding, bliss and misfortune.

Q&C (Questions and Conclusions)

• Are these actual patterns of desplazamiento y condensación apt for scientific writing or only fit for the construction of delirious drama by the way of Freudian dreamwork?
• Will hot & cold wright more confusion than clarity and good for further inquiry?
• Should we stop using meta terms like them all together?
• Should we switch over to using HD and SD and the vocabulary of the scientifically minded?
• Is jazz music a productive ground for figures of ecological media research?
• Should we stop listening to the teachings of Master Yoda and Manny the Mammoth?

In our experience and hence opinion, of course these terms are still worthy of use and worthy of us. They will confuse little and clarify a lot. And so should we. Stop worrying to much is what we should do.

• We should go on using holistic figures of speech.
• We should continue to read and hear aphoristic stuff.
• We should follow on with deconstructing manifestos and cult texts and speeches but also look at the inner laws of media and their effects.
• We should still try to see the world through many looking glasses, not least through les yeux, les doigts, la bouche, le nez et les oreilles of a made up mammoth or E.T. even.
• Surly we should als use the wonderful echos from the perceptions of Prof. McLuhan.

What all the good stuff in the writings and speeches and interviews of dead gentlemen like Prof. McLuhan should help us with, is, motivate us to develop a scientific, magic and holistic kind of media ecology by all means we can come by. The world needs this as much as it needs food and energy and more than it needs new iPhone software.

Media Hot & Cool - Its Origins in Music

"Hot & cool" appear to be strange and even a bit woolly metaphors in McLuhan's conceptual world. Though they constitute an opposition they are on different points in the scale. It's not "hot & cold" or "warm & cool" as one might expect. They are also not quite fully in line with the accepted basic structures of acoustic, visual and touch.

This has the effect that "cool" & "hot" somehow reverberate through the media-ecology model and disturb many readers. Hot & cool, in average parlance, denote content and style attributes of temperature (of air and water) and then people, clothing, music and other stuff. Thinking about them historically can easily blur many things. Take care.

The Sources

As has been mentioned by many, "hot & cool" most probably came to McLuhan from the vocabulary of writing about 40ies to 60ies jazz music. So, beaming back to that time might help us to get a better understanding of "hot & cool".

While african american culture turned to cool white man went darn hot and dancing.

Fast Forward to 70ies Pop

And back again.

A Rich Neighbor

When Steve Jobs found out about Windows, he went ballistic.

"Get Gates down here immediately", he fumed to Mike Boich, Mac's original evangelist who was in charge of our relationships with third party developers. "He needs to explain this, and it better be good. I want him in this room by tomorrow afternoon, or else!"

"And, to my surprise, I was invited to a meeting in that conference room the next afternoon, where Bill Gates had somehow manifested, alone, surrounded by ten Apple employees. I think Steve wanted me there because I had evidence of Neil asking about the internals, but that never came up, so I was just a fascinated observer as Steve started yelling at Bill, asking him why he violated their agreement."

Read more at folklore.org

Andy Hertzfeld also remembers the incident in a similar but relevantly different way. We think Hertzfelds description is probably the more faithful of the two:

"... He (Jobs) was trying to get them (MSFT) to forget about the OS business, since the applications business would be much bigger total dollars. He said, "It's not that I don't trust you, but my team doesn't trust you. It's kind of like if your brother was beating up on my brother, people wouldn't say it was just your brother against my brother, they would say the Gates are fighting with the Jobs." Bill responded that "No Steve, I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox, and you went in to steal the TV, and found that somebody else had stolen it. So you say, "hey, that's not fair. I wanted to steal the TV".

All enhancements added by TinyTalk plc.

Now, one should never forget that Steve grew up with a single hippie mother and Bill in a very-well-to-do intact WASP household. What this did with them and how Jobs for a long time had troubles with the corporate world and Gates had not, how Jobs always fought against open systems and Gates profited from them, how Jobs had self-educated impeccable style and Gates had not at all is a topic for another day.

But now, after all these years, what will motivate Jobs when Gates is a pensionnaire and philantrope? Selling ever shinier stuff to ever richer kids can't be that sharp. AAPL's profits have risen well above MSFT's. Are the suits really still the guys you want to impress? Come on Steve, you have earned to relax just a bit. There are enough young guys'n'gals to carry the torch, :-)

PS: The differences between LISA/MacOS and DOS/Windows - despite everything that respective fans suspect - are mainly based in the ISAs (instruction set architectures), implementation and memory management of the original 16- and 32bit architectures of Intel and Motorola respectively. And then the overall cost of those architectures and in turn with Gates' office business oriented preference for the Intel and later IBM world, while Wozniak/Apple had chosen Motorola/Mostek with its cleaner architecture and better path. Watch the following video if you're interested in why and how Intel won the microprocessor wars until heat and power consumption problems heaved a poverty driven European architecture, made possible by American tools, heaved ARM into the saddle of the winning horse. Which is yet another story for another time.

There was also a corresponding large difference in SW philosophy of which MSFT's was more modern and less performant than AAPL's (bytecode, virtual machines, portability, high level languages vs. pragmatic handcrafted "small is beautiful" Motorola ISA assembly and manually optimized Apple Pascal Code in the beginning). That difference like with the one with Multiplan/Excel vs. Lotus 1-2-3 first gave the advantage to Apple and the hand-crafters and then, after some years to Microsoft. None of these optimizations are necessary anymore, one might add.

The very same reasons also caused the ancestors of both, the beautiful Xerox Alto, Dolphin and Dorado with their advanced Smalltalk, Cedar, Gypsy and Star interfaces (the latter even had a now becoming fashionable in mobiles 3-line menu icon in 1981) to plummet to the bottom of the waters called market rules like a cannon ball.