Thinking out loud

Philip K. Dick
"Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night."

I make no pretense that I am an eloquent reviewer of movies or music, or of any arts really. Art is so subjective an experience that quantifying one's emotional response in order to persuade others is rather ridiculous. There are people who make a living being critics, who spend hours wrestling with our inexact language to convince others of the merits or lack of merits of a particular piece. I'm not one of those people: I struggled in Art History classes because the language of art criticism seems so overwrought and pretentious that it didn't (doesn't) make sense to me. Reviewers of other mediums aren't usually as bombastic, but again, I find it difficult to emulate good criticism.

That said, I still enjoy annotating and cataloguing my immediate response to music I hear, or films I watch. Partially, it's part and parcel of the entire web zine (err, blogging) motivation - to attempt to pluck some meaning out of the immense amount of information that floods my consciousness by picking out parts that interest me. In years past, this meant clipping magazine article, bothering everyone I knew with voluminous emails, scribbling in a journal, etc., but also meant that aided recall was sometimes difficult. Posting these items onto a public web page is similar, but of course, quite different. By typing up my emotional responses to the music I listen to, or the films I watch, I add these strands to the woof of my (public) life.

While on this topic, I want to expand my 'brief survey of music before the Punk movement started in the early 70's that nonetheless adhered to the spirit/ethos of Punk' (mentioned here) to include Bob Dylan's 1966 tour of the U.S. and England. Some of his backing band in the States couldn't handle the constant showering of abuse, and quit (according to an interview in No Direction Home, Al Kooper quit because the next stop on the tour was Dallas, where Kennedy was just shot, and Kooper was fearful of his own life), so The Band joined Dylan instead. Every night there was a chorus of boos and abuse thrown at the stage, but that didn't stop Dylan from instructing his accompanists to "Play Fucking Loud"


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This page contains a single entry by Seth A. published on October 2, 2005 9:18 PM.

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