The election of November 4th, 2008 is only a few hours away, but time has slowed to a crawl. We aren’t asking who won the week or who won the day. Now we ask who won the hour, who won the minute? As time unfolds before us, we track the fluid dynamics of a community of millions making a critical decision.
Comments closedAuthor: cgerrish
Unemployed philosopher
Black ink impressed on paper in specific patterns is decodable by a very large segment of the population. Part of the infrastructure we depend upon for our daily conversation is the machinery to put ink on paper, produce large numbers of copies and deliver an individual copy to an endpoint for consumption and decoding. Information, thought and opinion is defused into the language of our society to be discussed, ignored, judged and routed or relayed to others. The speed and regularity of this system are a key part of its economics and value proposition.
The discussion around the merits and demerits of classical music is one of the threads delivered through the news/ink/paper system. The other night I went to see Alex Ross, the classical music critic for the New Yorker, in conversation with Joshua Kosman, the SF Chronicle music critic. Ross is touring the country in support of his book on classical music in the 20th century called “The Rest is Noise.”
One of the threads of the discussion addressed the fact that classical music criticism is disappering from America’s daily newspapers. Music critics are being dropped and they aren’t being replaced. The conversation is dying out as expressed through the medium of daily ink. People are still talking, but the economics of daily ink no longer can support it as a venue. Certainly it continues in both weekly and monthly ink. Our daily conversation about classical music becomes a gypsy looking for more hospitable environs.
Rather than the typical ‘the Internet killed the newspaper’ meme, Alex Ross was very positive about how the conversation had moved into a new home and in many respects is now more lively. Ross’s own blog is perhaps a model for capturing the swarming interest around a particular performance, topic or conversation. He can go very deep into an obscure composer, make a stunningly poetic link between Wallace Stevens and Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson, or compare Queen and Aaron Copland.
There was a moment in the stream of our public conversation when a publication like Life Magazine could focus our attention on the work of someone like Jackson Pollack. An editor could set the topic and the nation weighed in. We hated Pollock. We loved Pollock. Our kid could do that. We never understood it or knew about it until now. Discovery was delivered to us in our mailboxes. Alex Ross is no Life Magazine, but he now has the tools to put both the major cultural event and the little experimental downtown concert in front of us.
Night Fantasies from The Chamber Music Society on Vimeo.
Batter My Heart
by John Donne / John Adams
Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to’another due,
Labor to’admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly’I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me,’untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you’enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
5 Comments…a chattering dialogue across the river by two washerwomen who as night falls become a tree and a stone. The river is named Anna Liffey.
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