"The rest is just the rest." - Lance Olsen, Always Crashing the Same Car
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"It is rather the case that language can’t locate the appropriate langu"The rest is just the rest." - Lance Olsen, Always Crashing the Same Car
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"It is rather the case that language can’t locate the appropriate language. It isn’t as if, if you tried hard enough, you could rummage out the right phrase. It’s that our system of communication just can’t tolerate certain pressures and torques." - Lance Olsen, Always Crashing the Same Car
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Almost broke me in parts. Nearly broke me in pieces. Experimental, playful, sad. Let me process and I'll get back and expand on my experience with Bowie. Always writing the same review twice here on Goodreads.
Fragments that could all be their own review:
- Chapter as a glossary - Chapter as Bowie's favorite books - Chapter contradicting previous chapter - Author as narrator - Author as fan - Narrator (Alec Nolens) anagram of author (Lance Olsen) - Author as mensch - Memory in fragments - Knowledge as fragments - Love as fragments - Decay as fragments - Art as fragments - Art as theft - Death as theft - Love as theft
We live in a world of fragments: twitter, tik tok dances, instagram photos, quotes, collective memories and memes. Someone like David Bowie is constructed into this world, before the world. Bowie is a strange UFO that shoots and screeches across a green screen, appears, and then disappears. How do we make sense of the mosaic? What are these collection of facts, myths, images, constructs, songs, lovers, but a giant play pretending to be a life pretending to be a man trying to communicate in a sea of strangeness. How can we ever really know our heroes? Our idols? Our lovers? Ourselves?
Olsen doesn't give the reader any answers, but gives us enough ways of looking at the Icon from Mars, the Thin White Duke, that you start to believe -- not in Bowie, not in Tom, not in Newton, but in billion of stars that exist, love, shine, and eventually darken and die together....more
"...without music, life would be a mistake." - Fredrich Nietzsche, quoted in The Orchestra, A VSI
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I didn't grow up listening to classical music,"...without music, life would be a mistake." - Fredrich Nietzsche, quoted in The Orchestra, A VSI
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I didn't grow up listening to classical music, but orchestral music grew on my in college as I bought cheap Naxos sets (while still mainly fixated on alternative and punk rock). I continued to deepen my appreciation for the form, however, slowly year after year. Most recent years find me attending one or two concerts. This year (next week actually), I'm flying out to LA with my wife to see Dudamel and the LA Philharmonic perform Mahler's 9th. There is something about seeing an orchestra peform a piece by Mahler, Beethoven, Mozart, Brahams, etc., that is hard to capture in a CD or vinyl reproduction.
That said, this has also been a perfect time to collect CDs of classical music. You can buy cheap, wonderful pressings of the classical repertoire. I pick up, almost weekly, at Goodwill or other 2nd-hand-stores: Sony, Deutsche Grammophon, RCA Victor, Archiv, Decca, London Classics, etc., for $1-$3 a cd (practically unlistened to).
This book reads almost like David Byrne's How Music Works but for the Orchestra. Holoman describes the history, politics, money, art, venues, conductors, and music of orchestral music. As a lover of the orchestra it was entertaining and enlightening. Nothing came as a shock, but it put a lot in historical and musical perspective and reminded me both how dynamic and new orchestral music (as currently structured) really is. ...more
"But when we speak of music we are really talking about a multiplicity of activities and experiences; it is only the fact that we call them all 'music"But when we speak of music we are really talking about a multiplicity of activities and experiences; it is only the fact that we call them all 'music' that makes it seeem obvious they belong together." -- Nicholas Cook, Music: VSI
'Music: A Very Short Introduction' is one of the very first books in Oxford's series. It is both MORE and LESS (not to be confused with more or less) than what I was expecting. It was more of an academic, post-modern, post-colonial, Marxist look at music. Since the Western Canon is the elephant in the room for any discussion of Music, it gets most of the attention, but Cook also spends a lot of time wandering around the idea of Music as cultural system, language, and representation of culture and society. He also explores critical theory, musicology, music theory, and the potential for music as a means of cross-cultural understanding and insight. There was a part of me (the part that will occassionally flirt with Wittgenstein AND John Cage) that enjoyed the academic and cerebral approach to understanding Music.
There was also a part of me that wanted to tightly wrap a brass trumpet around Cook's neck. I don't think these books need to be easy, but part of the issue with academics in many fields is their tendency to write for their own little group (the less of my more AND less). I'm not sure this book would be of interest for many beyond a MUSIC501 (Introducton to Musicology) course at Duke, etc. I guess for me this type of a book, as an amatuer music listener, would be more Schönberg and less Mozart. It is aimed at the few and not the many....more
I went into this thinking 1) it was going to be ALL about Proust and 2) I kinda know what Jonah Lehrer is going to say and 3) it will maybe be 3 to 4 I went into this thinking 1) it was going to be ALL about Proust and 2) I kinda know what Jonah Lehrer is going to say and 3) it will maybe be 3 to 4 stars. But damn. I both over and underestimated it. Crazy brain. I REALLY liked its structure: Proust was one chapter, but there were chapters on Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Walt Whitman, Paul Cézanne, Igor Stravinsky, etc..
He exceeded my expectations, kept me engaged, and even his Coda at the end was strong. Sometimes, it did feel a bit forced. Like he REALLY wanted Virginia Woolf to be able to explain the self so bad, but it was enjoyable as far as delivering an argument (with few citations).
It wasn't a perfect little book, but it was fun. HOWEVER --
I DO, unfortunately, have to re-evaluate an author by his later looseness with Bob Dylan*. See:
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