September 2010

Interesting post on Slate about the Lennon McCartney songwriting partnership (hat tip MM). This anecdote begins the piece (no source is given):

John and Paul did balance and complement each other magnificently, and we can pile example on example. When they were writing "I Saw Her Standing There," Paul offered this opening verse:

She was just seventeen
Never been a beauty queen

"You're joking about that line," John shot back, "aren't you?" He offered this revision:

She was just seventeen
You know what I mean

There it is: Innocence meets sin—an inviting, simple image takes a lusty, poetic leap.

Also, snotty meets friendly. The article has another story about Lennon breaking a washboard over the head of a band member (pre-Beatles) who announced he wanted to leave the group. The Slate piece avoids the sadomasochistic aspects of the MacLen equation--it's more about "friendly competition."

Not that John did anything that violent to Paul (that we know of), but the question remains: "Is improving your art worth having a washboard broken over your head?"

After a lengthy discussion of the limits of language in describing a classic of dark ambient music on the Disquiet blog, was somewhat humbled by this statement, in an essay comparing people who want to believe 20th Century music is a conspiracy to people who want to believe the moon landings were faked:

This is not to say that you're crazy if you find atonal modernism incomprehensible. (Unless you also believe that the moon landing was a hoax: then you are crazy.) But the persistence of the argument that it ought to be comprehensible is coming from the same place. It's why that whole twelve-tone music as Nazi espionage code hoax from a while back was so spot-on funny. It's why the reaction against the new—which, in the Romantic era, most often was couched in terms of compositional incompetence—is now more likely to introduce an emperor's-new-clothes aspect. It's why criticism of the complex and the complicated is so often laced with accusations of deliberate obfuscation: if it can't be completely grasped, it must be a con.

It is a con. But only because all music is a con. Music is constantly conning us into mind-bogglingly vivid emotional reactions even though it's communicating practically nothing at all, qualifying as a language-game only on terms so rudimentary as to be a caricature. It presents us with timbres and pitches and rhythms that we turn around and project whole worlds onto, worlds so intricate that we can't even fully map them. It's all impossible to grasp—and it's all true, as true as you want or need it to be. The difference between music and the historical, contingent world it exists in is this: if music seems to be trying to sell you a bridge to the moon, then somewhere, there's a bridge to the moon to be had. You might not want to bother looking for it. That doesn't mean the rest of us can't.

Humbled because the author makes it seem so obvious. Perhaps we could say that all music defeats language but some defeats it more than other. Hat tip avianism - and be sure to check out the link in the quoted passage to the Schoenberg-as-Nazi-code satire - really well done dry humor relevant to the whole frustrating cats discussion. (Frustrating because arguments have to keep being reasserted - like whack-a-mole with 12-tone cats.)

hat tip to timb for this Hacker News thread on the demise of bloglines and the post-newsreader environment generally. Several non-Google alternative suggestions are made, for example, feedingo.

Possibly we have a situation similar to the old sailor saw "water, water everywhere..." A million feeds out there and no good way to organize them. Would rather get information and opinion from blogs than the lyin' mainstream media that brought us the Iraq War (and still hasn't owned up to its role), loved Bush, and childishly equates rational critique with "hippies" but how to consolidate all this data?

A couple of good individual comments. Jay Neely:

I reluctantly switched from Bloglines to Google Reader a year or so ago when it became clear they weren't improving their product any further. Unfortunately, I've been just as frustrated with Google's lack of innovation. And it seems like the new services I've seen (Pinyadda, feedingo) are focused on dumbing down RSS for casual users rather than serving the needs of information professionals.

And this subthread:

pquerna:
I think there is an unmet market, and the consolidation into twitter/facebook won't meet the needs of all people.
Bloglines and Google Reader both were flawed in providing the user with too much information; Facebook's feeds and twitters short memory prevent a buildup of thousands of unread things, and were better about promoting what was important.

johns:
People are still trying. Feedingo http://feedingo.com/ recently launched. I think it's a 1 or 2 person startup.
I think the long-term future of RSS feeds is integrated with my other social streams somehow that allows me to see all of them. Twitter could probably eliminate the need for a reader for a lot of people if they let you follow RSS feeds like you follow people.

Kilimanjaro:
I created http://www.hackerblogs.com to fill my need for news about programming. Since then I rarely use google reader.
I like the river of news approach better than the categorized feeds. I don't care if I miss a couple of days of news, they don't pile up anymore and I don't feel like I have to read them all to catch up.

kmfrk:
There has been a void for a great - heck, decent - RSS reader in plenty of years. Maybe Mac users didn't notice because they have the privilege of NetNewsWire.
As I said, I'm trying out Fever, and I'm sure others are willing to use a paid service.

Someone else mentions the Newsfox plugin for Firefox. Will check out some of the suggestions in the thread and report back.