"A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave. It sniffs—it sucks—it strokes its eyes over the whole uncomfortable range. Suddenly one strikes. Why? Moments snap together like magnets, forging a chain of shackles. Why? I can trace them. I can even, with time, pull them apart again. But why at the start they were ever magnetized at all—just those particular moments of experience and no others—I don’t know. And nor does anyone else. Yet if I don’t know—if I can never know that—then what I am doing here? I don’t mean clinically doing or socially doing—I mean fundamentally! These questions, these Whys, are fundamental—yet they have no place in a consulting room."

- Richard Burton's psychiatrist Martin Dysart, in Peter Schaffer's Equus 

Dysart - "dice heart" ? "dies art"?

"Stay away from pop music. It is too crudely percussive. Sounds like gun fire."

- William H. Glass (advice to writers)

 "By far the most common problem afflicting the writers in Michels’s practice is procrastination, which he understands in terms of Jung’s Father archetype. “They procrastinate because they have no external authority figure demanding that they write,” he says. “Often I explain to the patient that there is an authority figure he’s answerable to, but it’s not human. It’s Time itself that’s passing inexorably. That’s why they call it Father Time. Every time you procrastinate or waste time, you’re defying this authority figure.” Procrastination, he says, is a “spurious form of immortality,” the ego’s way of claiming that it has all the time in the world; writing, by extension, is a kind of death."

Barry Michels, Therapist for Blocked Screenwriters : The New Yorker

 Rockism versus Popism in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World:

"And yet," said Helmholtz when, having recovered breath enough to apologize, he had mollified the Savage into listening to his explanations, "I know quite well that one needs ridiculous, mad situations like that; one can't write really well about anything else. Why was that old fellow [i.e. Shakespeare] such a marvellous propaganda technician? Because he had so many insane, excruciating things to get excited about. You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases....

[Said the Controller]"But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead."

[said the Savage] "But they don't mean anything."

"They mean themselves; they mean a lot of agreeable sensations to the audience."

"But they're … they're told by an idiot."

The Controller laughed. "You're not being very polite to your friend, Mr. Watson. One of our most distinguished Emotional Engineers …"

"But he's right," said Helmholtz gloomily. "Because it is idiotic. Writing when there's nothing to say …"

"Precisely. But that requires the most enormous ingenuity. You're making flivvers out of the absolute minimum of steel–-works of art out of practically nothing but pure sensation."

The Savage shook his head. "It all seems to me quite horrible."

"Of course it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand."

We value authenticity (consistency, integrity, etc) in politics.

And abhor those without core.

But in intellectual / theoretical / critical circles, flexibility is generally a positive term;  open-mindedness and adaptability are deemed virtues and advantages.

And in pop music, all right-thinking people regard authenticity as an irrelevant concept and an obsolete criterion for judgement...  a quaint throwback thing to concern yourself with.

In pop, reinventing yourself is considered not just clever and artistic, but the essence of what pop is about.

Pop is the art of the "true lie". Even apparent real-ness is a pose and an act, to be judged according to how convincingly it's executed rather than whether it correlates with the artist's lived reality.

So how come there's this discrepancy, this fissure, between what's valued in politics and what's valued in culture?

I guess you could say that art/culture/pop is altogether less consequential; it doesn't matter if an artist or performer is pretending to be something they're not....

Still, it's quite a gulf...  I wonder how it came about.

(It's true that politics, or in political commentary at least, there's been a lot of pomo-tinged, Rorty-esque talk in recent years of "optics" and "narratives"...  even Obama talked openly last week about his having failed to "tell a story" to the American people about what's been going down these last three-four years... but generally that kind of thing is about the successful or not-so-successful presentation of what's essential and actual, as opposed to outright fiction...  overall, in the public political domain, people still tend to talk in the language of Truth and Right).

"We're going through this super-uptight era, which I think comes entirely from literacy, actually. It's the result of machines that were designed as word processors being used for making music." - Brian Eno

Written and raved about a lot of stuff over the years, and some of it's aged better than others. Some doesn't seem as rave-worthy as it did at the time.  No indeed.

To an extent you worked with what you were supplied at any given time. The state of the scene fluctuates. (And  specifically with Singles columns, sometimes the week it was your turn there was a real scrabble to find anything for the top spot. Other times, I was spoiled for choice. Once I had seven singles of the week).

Doesn't bother me at all, to have been "wrong", to have over-estimated things. I think "hype" is part of the job of the music journalist. Much better to hail excessively and prematurely than to weigh in with judicious, measured, deflationary assessments. Leave that to the newspapers.

But it is interesting, to look back and see what's endured.  Not because I believe in the Test of Time. Assuredly, some music is only meant for its moment. Realistically, judged against the scale of Eternity, the most transient, trivial, local pleasure and the "truly lastingly universally important" are barely distinguishable.  If you'd really contemplate the vastness and indifference of the universe,you'd never be able to use the word "universal" to describe anything human-related. 

Besides, even if Time's test had validity, there's no way you can gauge what's going to make the grade long-term, when you're responding immediately as a real-time week by week journalist.

But it is interesting to look back and see what's faded away versus what proved to be imperishable, in terms of your own life.  Judged purely from the vantage point of your own eyes and ears.

A lot of the time, it is a case of  "what was I thinking?"....

But sometimes the song still astonishes and enchants, tantalises the imagination as genuine Lost Classic, a should-have-been ....

"The furious peroration sounds like nothing so much as a horde of demons struggling in a torrent of brandy, the music growing drunker and drunker. Pandemonium, delirium tremens, raving, and above all, noise worse confounded!" - William Forster Abtrop, on Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony

"Stink one can hear"  - Eduard Hanslick, on the Violin Concerto

Some records evoke times of your life: Head Over Heels and Sunburst and Snowblind, the debut Smiths album, those records remind me with incredible vividness of a student bedsit in north Oxford, the yearnings and miseries of that time; "Thieves Like Us" carries with it the flush of romance remembered; there's plenty more examples....

But with most music, the memories carried are memories of the music itself, if that makes sense. When you're a music fiend, that function of commemoration or life-soundtracking or "our song" that perhaps remains prominent for the more casual listener, it really fades away. You might say that music's life eclipses your own, or it becomes one with it, or it fills in the holes. Music doesn't serve as a mirror for narcissistic identification so much as a means of leaving one's self behind. A favorite record, then, might be more like gazing at a landscape, the kind of place you'd revisit at different stages of your life. A perennial source of wonder. 

This is why I'm not a huge fan of memoiristic criticism: oh, it can be done well, but even at its best it doesn't really tell you anything about the music. That one individual's memories adhere to a piece of music in a particular fashion doesn't mean they inhere to it in a meaningfully transmissible way; my private significance is unlikely to signify to others, have any relation to what you or anybody else might glom onto the same record. 

Of course it's true that the narcissistic projection towards a song/album/group that music arouses so potently can make it feel like those life-experiences are somehow contained and distilled by the  music, that this is the music's purpose, why it exists.... We are self-centred creatures, after all. 

 “A man's features, the bone structure and the tissue which covers it, are the product of a biological process; but his face he creates for himself. It is a statement of his habitual emotional attitude; the attitude which his desires need for fulfilment and which his fears demand for their protection of prying eyes. He wears it like a devil mask; a device to evoke in others the emotions complementary to his own. If he is afraid, then he must be feared; if he desires, then he must be desired. It is a screen to hide his mind's nakedness.”

"One thinks that one wants to be understood when one wants only to be half-understood. If a person really understands you, you fear him."

"It was because I feared him and could not understand him as he understood me that I hated him."

- Eric Ambler, The Mask of Dimitrios

(via Andrew Parker)

 "I have been grinding through life for the last few weeks. Nothing major—lots of good things going down, though some bummers are afoot—but I have felt unusually afflicted by a stream of hassles, disappointments, missteps, frustrations, inabilities, and time-sucking tasks at once complicated and trivial, a typical 21C run I guess, but made more stern and enervating by all those looming Zeitgeist thunderheads about, swollen with their intransigent karma, ready to release their rain of suck. Though my sitting practice has been bearing fruit of late, it sometimes seems that my delusions have not dissolved nearly as much as my capacity for denial, and that whatever insight comes simply make more room for the fine-grained grok of dukha." - Erik Davis