Bredonborough Morning researchreading for The
09.41
Bredonborough.
Morning research-reading for The Writing Project…
… in the Home Study…
… and then into the Cellar…
… where data whizzes around and about.
On the Guestbook…
Sam Harris
:: Posted by BiusKoch on February 16, 2012
RF is actually reading The Moral Landscape. Well - I am very interested about his opinion. Does he tend to getting an atheist? (-;
bibliophiliacal tumescence
:: Posted by lotusspray on February 11, 2012
No burning questions but perhaps simple intellectual curiousity? Mr Fripp frequently shares his morning reading with us but only occassionally discusses his morning reading with us. May I ask what he thought of Sam Harris’s argument in THE MORAL LANDSCAPE?
Very briefly, and not as a reviewer…
Rationality is necessary to informed decision-making in any branch of public life – politics, economics, media, education, healthcare, housing, invading foreign countries, et al. And yet little political debate that I see, read and hear seems based very much in reason. One example: current electioneering in the US for the Republican candidacy. Sam Harris draws attention to the nominal division between Church and State in the US; yet we note the influence of the Religious Right and the primacy of the candidates’ religious views in the Republican electioneering. In this sense, perhaps we can view the New Atheists as proponents of neo-Enlightenment thinking.
From the standpoint of someone who has dealt with the feelings and reactions of musicians, professionally, for 45 years: let’s hear it for rationality! Good to have an engaged feeling-life; not good to base life-directing decisions on arbitrary impulses and prejudices; in a word, irrationality.
But reason only goes so far, albeit a long way. To travel further requires a leap in the dark; in a word, faith. Perhaps better expressed, then, as a leap into the Light. Faith is not superstition, not investment in dogma; rather, an experiential participation and engagement in a creative process informed by Love: an action founded in a discipline, way or practice. Belief is personal, what we hold. Faith is impersonal, and embraces us.
For a boy, to aspire to a world-standard as a guitarist when tone deaf and with no sense of rhythm, is profoundly unreasonable; very much a leap in the dark. Yet, to follow that aim required the application of reason, and a lot of practicing.
All the learned textbooks, on the –ologies and –isms of various forms of musical undertaking, don’t quite prepare us for when Music leans over and whispers in our ears, and takes us into its confidence. When we have a direct contact with the promptings of the Muse, the weighty books are useful for framing discussion of our experiencings, placing them in the wider context of musical, cultural and social life; but not as much for explaining the mechanics of how and why music, the Wine of Silence, enters our lives.
Music engages the feelings, and is perhaps the best readily-available language we have for expressing the feeling-life. Perhaps, in time, we move from believing in the power of music to having faith in Music’s essential benevolence.
Reason is primarily a cerebral activity, and best addresses the phenomenal world, what is available to sensory investigation; and stops in front of the noumenal. Both conditioned and unconditioned worlds (of facts and values) are necessary, to be brought together in action; which shouldn’t be so hard - because they are not apart. We can analyse the soundings of music and its forms of organization – frequencies and structure – but to enter the quality of musicness, something else is required; and this involves the heart.
Our practical difficulty is the fragmented nature of the human being: we are apart-within-ourselves, out of tune, out of time, discordant. So, this then becomes a practical question: how do we achieve personal harmony? This question may be reasonably addressed.
How can we be in step with ourselves? Were Mr. Harris to be reading this, he would already be twitching furiously; and would have my sympathy.
:: Posted by Undisciplined on February 15, 2012
emory0 wrote:
Maybe there’s a relationship between ticket prices and the individual attitudes of the audience, but it can’t be summed up like that across the board. Case in point, and mentioned this once before, that Crimson prices were over $100 to see them at Nokia Theater in Times Square. (Were you at one of those gigs, Em?) Prices escalated from the Thrak tour to TCoL, through Level 5 and TPTB. It’s not a complaint, just an observation. This listener always willingly paid the going rate.
At the time of the Nokia shows in 2008, I had a conversation with Mr. Agent Man. He told me that the ticket prices could be very much higher than what they were. We agreed it would be better to keep them below the top-market-rate. The price was high enough already, while noting that the band did not stay in luxury hotels nor get rich from those shows (or any others).
Will Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ever court the Crimson King?
:: Posted by Undisciplined on February 27, 2012
RE: Will Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ever court the Crimson King?
Hopefully that one day happens. It really be something to hear RF’s induction speech in the presense of the assembled remaining industry hotshots.
The answer is in the comment.
Will Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ever Court King Crimson Bruce Eder, at allmusicguide.com, summed up the band’s importance, writing, “If there is one group that embodies progressive rock, it is King Crimson. Led by guitar/Mellotron virtuoso Robert Fripp, during its first five years of existence the band stretched both the language and structure of rock into realms of jazz and classical music, all the while avoiding pop and psychedelic sensibilities; the absence of mainstream compromises and the lack of an overt sense of humor ultimately doomed the group to nothing more than a large cult following, but made their albums among the most enduring and respectable of the prog rock era.”
A critical point not generally made / recognised is that the musical achievements of the band/s could not have happened with commercial success on the level of The Usual Culprits. The sheer gravity that accompanies mass success pins the winged life to earth. The demands of fans and industry, the professional aspirations of the players, the calls to lower nature, sit on the creative life until it is squashed and crushed. One strategy for creative achievement: if success looms too large - break up, then begin again.
King Crimson succeeded in popular culture, not mass culture.
12.45 Soon off to DGM.
16.34 DGM HQ
Arriving c. 15.05. Kitchen meeting with David…
... covering various current arisings.
Also noted: the danger of gagging artists. When we silence our artists, the culture is in peril. We trust our artists to tell us the truth, whether we like what we hear or otherwise; even if they sometimes go over the boundary of social niceties, perhaps being rude and sometimes being mistaken. This is part of the price to be paid for telling the truth, worth paying IMO.
Also of great importance…
… the new DGM Cappucino Machine Of Wonder, Joy And Frothiness.
18.34 Kitchen discussion over exceptionally tasty MinxCake of the Christmas variety I...
II...
David is heading home. Here, an evening computing.
00.14 Main UK news today has been the testimony of Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers…
Leveson Inquiry: Evidence suggests 'network of corrupt officials'.A network of corrupt officials? Much like the music industry, then? Except the public as a whole suffers, rather than a small proportion, cast as artists and music-lovers employed by a major.
On one of the news channels today, I heard the astonishing argument, from a well-placed journalist - This is what it’s always been! There has always been payment for information! The implication – if behavior has always been unacceptable, although accepted-in-practice and the industry’s Standard-Operating-Procedure, then it’s alright! So, presumably, what is unacceptable when challenged, is acceptable when hidden from public view? Let’s hear it for gagging orders and outdated libel laws! The resonant words (of the then SG Alder Esq. in his office at 63a, Kings Road, Chelsea on April 17th. 1991) spring readily to mind: What have we done? We have nothing to hide!
But something has changed, and what seems to have changed is the public mood; to regard unacceptable as being and meaning unacceptable; and to require that behavior which claims propriety for itself is actually proper.
Alongside the testimony of DAC Akers in today’s UK news is the settlement by NewsCorp with
Charlotte Church. Ms Church and her parents have agreed damages and costs of £600,000 with News Group Newspapers - publishers of the defunct News of the World.
The settlement includes £300,000 in legal costs and a public apology.
Ms Church said she believed that despite an apology the paper was "not truly sorry, only sorry they got caught".
"We got a sense of how important the process of litigation here is, the process of discovery, with Ms Church saying it has only been in the last few days that she really learned the full extent of what had been happening," our correspondent added.
Despite being sorry, NewsCorp spent time, money and energy for most of the legal procedings in seeking to evade culpability and liability to the Church family.
In 1991, at the beginning of Endless Grief,
Dr. SG Alder (then Mr.
Sam Alder) sent me a hand-written letter that included these words: We’re sorry for what happened. He didn’t say what had happened. So while claiming to be sorry, Mr. Alder made no acknowledgment of the regrettable-but-unnamed actions, hence incurring no formal responsibility, nor liability, for whatever he claimed to be sorry for. Although he had nothing to hide, gagging-orders on artists and employees became Standard Operating Practice for EG.
Mr. Alder’s EG (1976/7 to 1990/1) was a founding part, IMO, of The Age Of Greed; which came to the clear attention of just about everyone with
the Great Crash of 2008. The responses and reactions of EG during Endless Grief provide an unhappy, expensive education and preparation for approaching current sad circumstances in the news.
Those in positions of responsibility are responsible for their actions, whether seen or unseen. This is surely not a complex notion, although an exception in my industry. If actions are wrong, they are not justified by not-being-illegal. Legal doesn’t mean good; and not–illegal doesn’t mean Right. Wrong, in this context, is acting intentionally to serve a narrow personal interest knowingly at the expense of others, without any concern for the negative consequences on those others. That is, a lot of people get hurt because of our actions – and we don’t care.
And then we have illegal. This version of Right has two forms:
1. not getting caught; or…
2. getting away with it when caught.
People not in overt, formal positions of responsibility are also responsible. This includes all of us, when asked to do things we know to be wrong, and do them. Our defence is as inadmissible now as in recent history: I was only following orders.
I wonder, were I part of the legal team acting for NewsCorp against the Church family: would I be a happy boy? Let’s put on Cognitive Dissonance and party away the night.
Appropriately,
it waits…
