Thursday, November 20, 2003
Billy Bragg chimes in from the far left during the Tell Us The Truth Tour which had a press conference and show at the Variety Playhouse this week:
"We send people home to think about changing the world, which is the audience's job rather than ours," Bragg said. "We're in a very interesting time. We're going to be the generation that gets to cast the new progressive idea outside the shadow of Soviet totalitarianism.
"Democracy is not passive. It is activist."
Democracy is lame, whether it's passive or active. It creates an illusion of power in an arena where most people are more or less impotent and causes them to be ineffective in the communities where they might have effect. I suppose people will say that it is the best way to run a system as large as our country, but democracy doesn't run anything. It's a way to provide information to the bureaucratic managers who are the movers of politics.
"We send people home to think about changing the world, which is the audience's job rather than ours," Bragg said. "We're in a very interesting time. We're going to be the generation that gets to cast the new progressive idea outside the shadow of Soviet totalitarianism.
"Democracy is not passive. It is activist."
Democracy is lame, whether it's passive or active. It creates an illusion of power in an arena where most people are more or less impotent and causes them to be ineffective in the communities where they might have effect. I suppose people will say that it is the best way to run a system as large as our country, but democracy doesn't run anything. It's a way to provide information to the bureaucratic managers who are the movers of politics.
Yesterday, I was walking through the courtyard that segregates the Old and New Architecture buildings on my way to the new city atop the hill where Theta Xi was scheduled to have its membership education meeting. A noise behind me, which I first imagined to be the footsteps of a running child, startled me out of my nicotine-induced revelry of thought on national and regional influence of men, particularly myself. The sound was not the steps of a child but a large leaf being blown and somersaulted across the courtyard. I began to try to compose a rhythm that would match the leaf. This led me to imagine finding an algorithm that would describe the movement of the leaf (yes, I just watched a Beautiful Mind) and then composing a musical setting to display the algorithm. This morning as I was catching a few early e-waves, I surfed to Terry Teachout's blog and saw there a piece on the Elements String Quartet's Snapshots presentation. The pieces of music that comprise this work may not directly support my next statement, but I believe that they are much closer than the body of most modern works. I feel like we need more pastoral music. Perhaps pastoral is not the best word, perhaps I should say we need more music which describes nature, or really anything other than human relationships - which is what almost all music is today (no thanks to postmodernism).
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
I am by no means advocating the contents of the following link, but I wish to have it on record so that I might see what they're about. http://www.transhumanism.org/index.htm
Hey! What am I doing here?
I have things to do, there's life outside -
and I'm stuck inside this classroom.
I have things to do, there's life outside -
and I'm stuck inside this classroom.
