free variable

I’ve discovered the Public Radio Exchange recently, which is some kind of digital distribution site connecting independent radio producers to radio stations. The upshot is that you can listen to a wide variety of pieces online; they also have a “podcast.” I listened to the first half of this piece on the “remix” movement. There wasn’t a lot in there that someone who’s familiar with the electronic music scene, the EFF, or Lawrence Lessig’s “free culture” project wouldn’t already know about, but it was a nicely-done piece.

The excerpt started by talking about DJ Danger Mouse’s fantastic “Gray Album” Beatles/Jay-Z mashup (download it if you haven’t!) and ended by observing some old antique-dealing duffers’ reactions to a show of New England antiques that had been “remixed” (presumably into statements against Western hegemony) by design students.

I really find the word “remix” grating if it’s applied to some medium other than music, but it appears to be here to stay.

The broadcast was most interesting, though, in the middle, in which a classics professor from Rice discussed the cento, a genre in which a new poem is made by taking arbitrary lines from other old poems and rearranging them. As far as I can tell from a cursory googling, the cento lives on today as a marginal genre for hacks, a cutesy pub stunt for puffed-up nerds, or a rhetorical technique for certain rarely-photographed opinion columnists. This prof, however, focused on the cento of the late Roman empire. He gave an example of a poet named Ausonius, who rearranged lines from Virgil into a passage that was racier than da Ponte’s Don Giovanni libretto. Pretty cool.