Neil Young: Music can’t change the world anymore
Move over Bob Geldof, Bono and Sting. Madonna and Justin, don’t worry, you don’t need four minutes or even to worry about saving the world any more with your music. Indeed, if you believe what rock guru Neil Young said on Friday in Berlin, music can’t save the world — at all.
“I think that the time when music could change the world is past,” Young told reporters, according to the AP. “I think it would be very naïve to think that in this day and age.”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,534069,00.html
Good grief
Kunstler’s eyesore of the month, which I will naughtily link off of his server:
Class meme
Bold the ones that are true for you. (I’ve added italics for close-but-no-cigar, so to speak, and for comments.)
The list is based on an exercise developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. The exercise developers ask that if you participate in this blog game, you acknowledge their copyright.
Father went to college
Father finished college (after getting kicked out of one U. and being in army)
Mother went to college
Mother finished college (after leaving an elite private college)
Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor (grandfather was a lawyer; dad worked in a college, but wasn’t appointed primarily as a prof.)
Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers
Had more than 50 books in your childhood home (but only at my dad’s; my mom was a librarian and we owned very few books)
Had more than 500 books in your childhood home
Were read children’s books by a parent
Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18
Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively (jeans and a shirt with a collar?)
Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs
Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs
Went to a private high school
Went to summer camp
Had a private tutor before you turned 18
Family vacations involved staying at hotels
Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18 (benefit of being an only child!)
Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
There was original art in your house when you were a child
Had a phone in your room before you turned 18
You and your family lived in a single family house - only for a few years after age 12
Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home
You had your own room as a child
Participated in an SAT/ACT prep course
Had your own TV in your room in High School
Owned a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College
Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16 (divorced parents entails plane travel!)
Went on a cruise with your family
Went on more than one cruise with your family
Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up
You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family (oh, man, did I know that we paid those oil bills; I still have economic anxiety over such things)
How stupid are we?
Caleb Crain reports in the 24-Dec-2007 New Yorker that only 13% of Americans are proficient in reading to the degree that they can “compar[e] viewpoints in two editorials” (p. 134).
(And I fear that the percent of Americans who can compare two viewpoints at all to be nearly as low.)
What is a democracy when only 13% of the people can compare viewpoints in what they read?
Weak claims
danah boyd’s blog is subtitled “making connections where none previously existed,” but a much better title would be: “making connections where none exist.”
Recently boyd mentions a Pew study (link seems to be bad now; hope it comes back) reporting that 60% of adults are not worried about how much information is available about them online, and that 61% do not bother to limit the amount of information that can be found about them.
Here’s boyd’s “connection”:
In other words, adults (and presumably there are parents in this group) are telling teens to be careful online and restrict what information they put up there while they themselves are doing little to protect their own data.
This reminds me of adults who tell their kids never to meet strangers online under any circumstances and then proceed to use online dating sites and, rather than meet in public places, choose to go to the stranger’s private residence. Adults need to think about safety too - it’s not a story of binaries. The safe and practical approach is somewhere between abstinence and uber risky behavior.
When boyd writes, “Adults need to think about safety too,” the implication is that adults shouldn’t be hypocrites, and that adults and children are more or less in the same game regarding privacy, sharing, and safety.
But this is obviously not true. Adults are adults. Children are children. That difference drives everything, including the obvious distinction between the ways adults view their own safety and the way adults view the safety of their children.
And, it must be noted, the sermon ends with boyd saying “The safe and practical approach is somewhere between abstinence and uber risky behavior.” Gee, thanks for the platitude and the moral judgement (for instance, closing off the possibility that for whatever reason, which is not my business, an adult might exercise her freedom to perform some uber risky behavior). You know something is wrong when a critic tries to define the outside boundaries. Roland Barthes called it “neither/nor criticism” (quote: “By this I mean this mythological figure which consists in stating two opposites and balancing the one by the other so as to reject them both. (I want neither this nor that.) It is on the whole a bourgeois figure, for it relates to a modern form of liberalism” [http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/theory/Barthes-Mythologies-Myth_Today-1984-2.html]).
For those of you have become bored with boyd’s untethered connections, I would advice you to remove her from your RSS subscription and add, say, Virgina Heffernan. You’ll learn more.
Maybe censorship isn’t a bad idea after all
Or we could at least excise the dancing.
Good reason to never work in a big company
Here’s a remarkable posting by Phil Windley summarizing a presentation where someone imagines Facebook with “enterprise” features — which are essentially about watching every move of your co-workers.
Here’s the link: http://www.windley.com/archives/2007/11/defrag_making_interactions_explicit.shtml
And here’s the image from Windley’s post, which I will duplicate here as an incentive to go read the summary. It seems like a really, really, really bad idea to me.
Mallon and Leithauser
How come no one has outed Thomas Mallon and Brad Leithauser as right-wingers? Mallon wrote for the American Spectator, and Leithauser for the New Criterion — UGH! When these guys get published in mainstream journals, they never mention this in their bios. Wikipedia is pretty quiet on this as well.
Those publishing bastards
That’s it, I am never, ever going to buy a book by a UK author on an American imprint.
I read in the newest Atlantic Monthly that certain key lines (having to do with adolescent sexuality) were removed from Pullman’s series The Golden Compass. Now, first of all, I totally respect those novels, if only for their wild atheism. But it happens that I could never finish the series. I quit with about 100 pages to go. I am now wondering if the bowdlerized extractions might have kept me going.
I remember when I read about the tweaks to Harry Potter for the stupid American reader — and at that time I thought: Why do this? Why remove the Englishness since that is arguably part of the “topic” of the Potter novels? As lite as they are, their Englishness is one of their virtues.
It used to be that solid American bookstores would have a couple of bookshelves of UK imprints. But not anymore. I guess I’ll have to go to amazon.co.uk, which I have done for CDs, etc.
10-Nov: Eric Martin and the Illyrians at the Middle East Corner
I really loved the Neats way back when, and never understood why people complained so much about their shift from their fey college rock sound to their brawny blues rock stance. I liked both, and there was really nothing like their post-shift “Big Loud Sound” at the time. OK, maybe the Gun Club.
In any case, Eric Martin is still around and for maybe ten years has been fronting a trio, Eric Martin and the Illyrians. The drummer is the estimable Randall Lee Gibson IV (from Scruffy the Cat), and bass is handled by Chris Maclachlan.
I supposed they’ve moved away from wanting to prove anything, and are instead serving up great blues and rock. A high point of the set was Eric doing a big harp solo to kick off a song. They finished with a great cover of “You’re Gonna Miss Me.” Some of the usual suspects were there — the lead guy from Triple Thick, some fans from the 80s era. I wish they’d play out more, and I think another reunion of the Neats is due.