Sometimes I think that, if capitalists and other fascists could make big profits from killing people, grinding them up and turning them into some sort of commodity, they totally would
and then I look at history and realise they totally did
and I peek between my fingers at the news and see that they totally still are
and then I totally know what needs to be done.
Wondering why we (including, in some circumstances, me) watch sport.
Are we ancient Romans watching gladiatorial combat to the death*? Defeat is a metaphorical death made ‘civilised’. Victory is metaphorical survival, the atavistic requirement of every species written in our genes.
The ancient Romans may not have been the first culture to institutionalise real combat and make it sport (see footnote again). They thought it needed actual death, but made safe for those watching through use of (non-people) slaves, ie others, not those watching.
And that reminds me of 5 Minutes of Hate (again). It being used by rulers to channel discontent of the populace away from them.
Might be a bit of a stretch to see the tennis or the football as pacification and control of the masses. But it does do that too.
If you want a revolution, stop all the big sports.
* is this right? Never studied ancient Rome, I haven’t even seen that Russell Crowe film.
#SomewhatRandomMusings and probably wrong.
Television which shows people fixing things that need fixing (in the broadest possible sense) is the only television I want to watch these days.
Read into that what you will.
Two forms of magic I have seen in real life:
1. When a good puppeteer begins to move their puppet, and within a few seconds, the puppet is alive. I love this, marvel at it whenever I see it.
2. [Rarer, maybe for instrument teachers only] When a young music student makes the leap from playing the notes to making music.
This latter one I witnessed once in my teaching career: I was teaching on a summer course, working with a teenager who was bogged down in technicalities. I tried to free them, and it worked, and they played a section of the piece beautifully for the first time, and I goggled at them and they absolutely knew why, and they were really pleased, and I didn’t need to say anything. Magic.
Resenting having to clean because dirt isn’t part of my world view.
#SomewhatRandomMusings that I found in drafts. Seems totally logical and fine.
It took me a long time to realise that Orwell’s Two Minutes of Hate mated with Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes of Fame and produced a thousand thousand offspring which are now ubiquitous, endemic, here to stay, and nastier for it.
PS Not a lot of people know that Orwell and Warhol are anagrams of one another 🤣
Recommendations
I wish to recommend this wonderful piece of music to friends. It doesn’t need help of course, it’s a masterpiece, but I feel, maybe because of who I am, or who my friends are, the need to explain myself.
To understand why I love this, it is necessary to know about such-and-such other piece, written before; about this earlier composer who influenced those who came after; it is necessary to be aware of this style or that innovation; to know how the edifice of that earlier age supports the later one.
It’s conversations all the way down, as all art is. How can I show what delights me without revealing at least some part of the discussion that has taken place, across the decades, reaching back centuries, between pieces and composers and cultures?
One might as well be recommending the last line of a play to friends, without telling them about the rest of it. “Go, bid the soldiers shoot.”
The Strauss Ob Conc that I posted about a week ago has today decides to become my unshakeable earworm and, much as I love it, at the twenty-eighth iteration of a phrase, I want to move on.
I wonder sometimes about why this happens, something coming into my head more or less unbidden. Maybe there is specific emotional content, the details of which are not known to my conscious mind, that contain a message my subconscious thinks I need to hear.
I sit, without a way to decode it, wondering
One of the reasons I moved to the UK (in my late 20s)was to find the right distance between me and my parents. I did not, at the time, know why the right distance was more than 5000km.
For all the years while my mother was still alive, I did not do anything for UK Mother’s Day (in March) because ‘she wouldn’t be expecting it’, and did nothing for N.Am Mother’s Day because ‘I wasn’t aware of it’.
Mentioned this to therapist. And into the little silence at the end, added ‘now you’re going to ask me if I think this is significant’.
Mother’s Day. Not one of the good Days.
One way of reading my career is that I have exposed myself to the distasteful necessities of commerce as little as possible, only enough to keep the bills paid. And minimising that exposure was vital for my mental health.
It is hard to justify some of my life choices in any other way. Though I suspect my therapist might not agree with this characterisation of things.
Jody Hughes