From Zenon M. Feszczak Sent Sat, Oct 2nd 1999, 04:21
From Zenon M. Feszczak Sent Sat, Oct 2nd 1999, 04:21
Ciao - Alright. Two deep breaths. Eddie Peel wrote: > > >If you're not secure enough in your own reasons for forwarding the material >that you might let something like obscenity keep you from sending it you >have problems. Well, we all have problems, I imagine. This comment hasn't really clarified mine, but perhaps this isn't the place for armchair psychoanalysis. >Lenny Bruce: Words aren't dirty, they are words. It is the meaning we >attach to them that empowers them (paraphrase). True. However, we do not arbitrarily assign that meaning. For us to communicate at all, there must be a certain level of shared meaning. I suspect that even those who freely use vulgarity know when and if that language may offend. Unless one that each of us creates our language in a vacuum. > >what is vulgarity? you need to qualify that term in order to "talk shit" >about it. See above. At most, one might claim it's a sliding scale within a culture, but there is some agreement. > >Rewritten version: >The more one sensitizes to the beauty of sound, the more one can enjoy >unconsidered sound - car alarms, >sirens, motorpsychlists, raving street people threatening to kill, idiot >beeps of reversing trucks, screeching sport (insert laugh track) utility >(?) vehicles, nasal car horns, ugly unrequested music shared from generous >windowsdown trunkopen speakersdistorting driversby- as a new approach to >appreciating what it is that we consider music in the first place. Yes, you're on a valid point there. Music becoming noise, noise becoming music. There is a capacity for redefinition certainly. The point I would like to consider: we have a choice what we redefine as valid expressions in our culture. What disturbs me about the most of the sounds I list above is that I associate them with violence and aggression, the desperate cry of the ego if you will. Perhaps one can reframe some of those. Difficult for me to recontextualize the words "I'll fucking kill you" as anything beyond the literal - if ungrammatical - intent. > >Try (just a suggestion) a less dogmatic, less modernist approach to enjoying >art. Postmodern are the times, enjoy them for all of their signifigance. I have tried, but am not convinced of the value of postmodernism. Perhaps as a destructive phase of something more constructive, but does not tenable in itself. Something like a Cartesian doubt. Suspect the culture goes mad if it doubts everything and eradicates all values. At any rate, we have not eradicated all values, so one might question which ones we do live by and whether we would like to continue to hold onto them. That is to say: The present is not necessari ly progress over the past. "Is" -/-> "Ought". As you have given me some advice which I will consider, I will politely return some, yours to take or discard: Step outside the present. > > >Go have some kids and perpetuate the dominant paradigm you hate breeder. >"Look at them look at how 'bad they're being'." "Let's not be 'bad', let's >tell everyone how 'bad' it is to be 'bad'." Not sure where all this hostility came from. I believe my views are hardly the "dominant paradigm"; we live in a culture of vulgarity after all. Hate I try to avoid; tends to consume the hater more than the hated at any rate. One tries to be civil, to give the benefit of the doubt, to approach constructively rather than escalate. My apologies if I've touched a raw nerve. This could be an interesting discussion, after all. A bit off-topic, but general questions of aesthetics as they correspond to music could be quite on-topic. Regards, 3 On now: Fuck Dub