(no subject)
Mar. 6th, 2020 06:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. Got the chest x-ray today - lungs are clear, not issues. Cough was most likely due to the blood pressure meds, and to dry air, feeling dehydrated, and allergies.
Now, if I could just get my sugar levels down -- probably help if I stopped buying and eating chocolate bares and chocolate covered marshmellow eggs. What can I say? Stress drives me to eat chocolate.
2. Twitter
Stephen King
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
stephenking
·
55m
The Hachette decision to drop the Woody Allen book makes me very uneasy. It's not him; I don't give a damn about Mr. Allen. It's who gets muzzled next that worries me.
Mixed. Censorship is not a good idea. But are they? I mean, Mr. Allen has enough money that he could always self-publish. I published non-traditionally as did other members of my family. And I know a lot of other people who are. The publishing industry rejects submissions all the time.
So is this really the same as muzzeling or censoring. Ponders.
I tweeted a response that no one will notice or even read. I'm kind of non-exsitent to the masses on Twitter and I want to keep it that way. Why people want to be popular or seen on social media is beyond me. It always makes me nervous.
"Replying to
stephenking
Is it censorship though? Ponders. With the internet - there's so many ways, cheap ones, to publish your own work now. Also, publishers reject writers books all the time for all sorts of reasons. Do we scream at them for censorship for rejecting our work or anyone's?"
[ETA: He deleted the entry? LOL! ETA2: No apparently the account and set up another one? Twitter is weird.]
I don't think it is.
Also responded to Courtney Milan's tweet:
Courtney Milan
T-Rex
courtneymilan
·
23m
I would have more sympathy for arguments that Woody Allen was getting censored because a publisher won’t put out his book if there weren’t large groups of people who are getting excluded entirely from publishing in their entirety.
Replying to
courtneymilan
Is it censorship though? I've independently published, as have most of my family and friends. Why? cough* publishing industry* cough. Should everyone who has had a novel or story or non-fictional work rejected - scream censorship? Because there is a lot of us...
[ETA: Her response? "It isn't censorship. That's why I said what I said." Seriously? How rude. My response: "Thank you for the clarification. Sorry I misunderstood." It's official, I'll stop buying her books and I've stopped following her. Note? If you are making your living writing romance novels, it's probably not a good idea to be snarky and attack people who respond to your posts on Twitter -- they very well may be your readers, the people reading your books and rec'ing them to others. She's not changing the world - I do more daily than she does. What she's doing is alienating people including those who agree with her. This happens a lot on social media. We get cranky and forget there's another person on the other side. We're not just writing messages in a bottle or to pixels, but actual people, who have feelings and fears and concerns and anxieties and bad days. If you are a successful artist (novelist, actor, filmmaker, etc) who depend on other to buy your work or look at it, then it behooves you not to alienate your audience. Then you won't have an audience and will be railing off all by yourself. I get that it's hard. I do it too. But I'm not making a living as a novelist. I was reminded tonight of why it is important to be careful with words.]
They are both going to ignore me. [ETA: unfortunately they didn't.] Why? I'm not important. I'm glad I'm not important. I do not want to be important. I want them to ignore me. Why? Famous people scare me. Fame = narcissism. [ETA: Yep, proof provided.]
What's this story all about? Woody Allen wrote a memoir. Little Brown and Company decided to publish it. Half their work force walked out in protest. They changed their minds. It's hardly the first time this has happened. I wouldn't celebrate it necessarily as an achievement in publishing. They didn't do it because it was the right thing to do, but because they got afraid of how they would appear to the masses and court of public opinion. Also the folks who walked out? They have a supplemental income via spouses, family, etc. I know I've met them. And I've interviewed and worked in publishing - you don't that much. It's called the glamour jobs for a reason.
3. Ah a NASA Photo of the Galaxies far far away...
NASA Photo on Twitter
4. The Age of Envy - How to be Happy When Everyone Else's Life Looks Perfect
We live in the age of envy. Career envy, kitchen envy, children envy, food envy, upper arm envy, holiday envy. You name it, there’s an envy for it. Human beings have always felt what Aristotle defined in the fourth century BC as pain at the sight of another’s good fortune, stirred by “those who have what we ought to have” – though it would be another thousand years before it would make it on to Pope Gregory’s list of the seven deadly sins.
But with the advent of social media, says Ethan Kross, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan who studies the impact of Facebook on our wellbeing, “envy is being taken to an extreme”. We are constantly bombarded by “Photoshopped lives”, he says, “and that exerts a toll on us the likes of which we have never experienced in the history of our species. And it is not particularly pleasant.”
Clinical psychologist Rachel Andrew says she is seeing more and more envy in her consulting room, from people who “can’t achieve the lifestyle they want but which they see others have”. Our use of platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, she says, amplifies this deeply disturbing psychological discord. “I think what social media has done is make everyone accessible for comparison,” she explains. “In the past, people might have just envied their neighbours, but now we can compare ourselves with everyone across the world.” Windy Dryden, one of the UK’s leading practitioners of cognitive behavioural therapy, calls this “comparisonitis”.
And those comparisons are now much less realistic, Andrew continues: “We all know that images can be filtered, that people are presenting the very best take on their lives.” We carry our envy amplification device around in our pockets, we sleep with it next to our pillows, and it tempts us 24 hours a day, the moment we wake up, even if it is the middle of the night. Andrew has observed among her patients that knowing they are looking at an edited version of reality, the awareness that #nofilter is a deceitful hashtag, is no defence against the emotional force of envy. “What I notice is that most of us can intellectualise what we see on social media platforms – we know that these images and narratives that are presented aren’t real, we can talk about it and rationalise it – but on an emotional level, it’s still pushing buttons. If those images or narratives tap into what we aspire to, but what we don’t have, then it becomes very powerful.”
To explore the role that envy plays in our use of social media, Kross and his team designed a study to consider the relationship between passive Facebook use – “just voyeuristically scrolling,” as he puts it – and envy and mood from moment to moment. Participants received texts five times a day for two weeks, asking about their passive Facebook use since the previous message, and how they were feeling in that moment. The results were striking, he says: “The more you’re on there scrolling away, the more that elicits feelings of envy, which in turn predicts drops in how good you feel”.
No age group or social class is immune from envy, according to Andrew. In her consulting room she sees young women, self-conscious about how they look, who begin to follow certain accounts on Instagram to find hair inspiration or makeup techniques, and end up envying the women they follow and feeling even worse about themselves. But she also sees the same pattern among older businessmen and women who start out looking for strategies and tips on Twitter, and then struggle to accept what they find, which is that some people seem to be more successful than they are. “Equally, it can be friends and family who bring out those feelings of envy, around looks, lifestyle, careers and parenting – because somebody is always doing it better on social media,” she says. How much worse would it have been for Shakespeare’s Iago, who says of Cassio: “He hath a daily beauty in his life / That makes me ugly,” if he had been following his lieutenant on Instagram?
While envying other people is damaging enough, “We have something even more pernicious, I think,” the renowned social psychologist Sherry Turkle tells me. “We look at the lives we have constructed online in which we only show the best of ourselves, and we feel a fear of missing out in relation to our own lives. We don’t measure up to the lives we tell others we are living, and we look at the self as though it were an other, and feel envious of it.” This creates an alienating sense of “self-envy” inside us, she says. “We feel inauthentic, curiously envious of our own avatars.”
The last paragraph of the above excerpt struck me as the most interesting, everything else I already knew:
“We have something even more pernicious, I think,” the renowned social psychologist Sherry Turkle tells me. “We look at the lives we have constructed online in which we only show the best of ourselves, and we feel a fear of missing out in relation to our own lives. We don’t measure up to the lives we tell others we are living, and we look at the self as though it were an other, and feel envious of it.” This creates an alienating sense of “self-envy” inside us, she says. “We feel inauthentic, curiously envious of our own avatars.”
I wonder about this. There's a movement in psychology that if you only post postive things or only write positive things - this will in turn attract positive things to you and result in only positive thoughts. I don't agree with this perspective. You can't erase negative thinking or judge it -- all it does is make it more ingrained. And repressing it - is not much better.
It's better to own the negativity, let go of it, and watch it float by like leaves on a stream. Denying you have any -- means you are bottling it up -- and at some point you will explode.
But I know a lot of shrinks and new age therapists who swear by it. I don't know if it helps them or not. It's never worked for me.
I do however agree that social media - in particular facebook, twitter, and instagram tend to trigger envy or foster it. Dreamwidth less so -- because most people on it don't tend to talk that much about their accomplishments, or how great they are constantly. Instead it's mainly fanfic, television reviews, meta, movie reviews, book reviews or personal journaling. There's less..."Bragging" and "Self-Promotion" -- possibly because we're all under aliases? (Shrugs). It's just the least narcissistic of the social media platforms I've interacted on.
5. How the Beatles Wrote the song A Day in the Life
“A Day in the Life” makes me appreciate how close John and Paul were, how well they understood and appreciated each other as artists, how their songs came from an oscillating process of writerly separation and then joining together. It makes me see them as a little universe of invention—all those vivid images and internal rhymes turned out as casually as woodworkers with a lathe. In this respect, it’s “A Day in the Life” of a songwriting team, working alone, coming together by delivering parts to each other’s houses, helping, suggesting, competing, vitiating, and then improving, pushing each other even as each offers his own view of things. Which is exactly how they both described the writing of “A Day in the Life.”
They were different. John was sly and scathing and quick, the dark-side observer at a remove. Paul was more optimistic, taking in the bright-size of life, deeply melodic, organized, romantic, and not so funny. The song conveys some of those differences in the middle verse with Paul’s bouncy fragment of autobiography—an adolescent schoolboy waking up from a deep sleep and muzzily getting ready to catch the bus—bending toward the existential meditations of John. (When Paul runs for the bus, John supplies the heavy breathing.) The beat is now peppy with drum and snatches of piano, a common Beatles rhythm. Nothing could be more banal, getting from bed to bus, just another day in the life caught in eight perfect lines.
And then he’s smoking (something) and we are back into a (cosmic) dream, back to John with his newspaper. And what does he find? A government tally of imperfections in the surface of English roads. John’s mention of Blackburn, Lancashire, gives the song the advantage of a memorably specific place name that is in service of a more general emotion—one of those strange alchemies that just happens to work in music. Think: Paul Simon’s Saginaw in “America” or Jackson Browne’s Winslow, Arizona, in “Take It Easy” or Neil Young’s Redwood in “Heart of Gold.” That the government really was out there in Blackburn, Lancashire, and counting potholes, was the sort of activity that appealed to Lennon’s absurdist northern sense of humor.
What did it all add up to? Four thousand! What did it all really add up to? A nonsense line about the relationship between holes and Royal Albert Hall’s seating capacity. Except decay, holes, people as holes, emptiness, and audience—it’s another mystery almost seen. The feeling is rather sad. These vocal sections were written and recorded first, with the empty linking section between the first John and Paul verses counted off bar by bar. To fill the empty space, they drew on their producer George Martin’s vast musical knowledge. John wanted “a musical orgasm.” Soon enough, half an orchestra of leading London classical musicians was assembled at Abbey Road Studios with instructions to play their instruments from lowest note to highest, navigating the allotted bars at their own pace. George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” begins with something similar, a solo clarinet glissando that was itself improvised at a rehearsal by the musician. In “A Day in the Life,” the idea was that the orchestra would slide up the scale micro-tonally, a free-form crescendo of accumulating pitches.
That recording session became a ’60s happening, with Beatles’ friends like members of the Rolling Stones and the Monkees and their sexy wives and girlfriends (like Pattie Boyd and Marianne Faithfull) turning out in the trippy regalia of the time. The orchestra wore proper dress-performance clothes. The Beatles handed out novelty-shop gag items: clown noses (for the very upstanding violins), plastic spectacles (for the more ebullient woodwinds and brass), wigs, balloons, whistles.
Yep, the Beatles continue to be among my all-time favorite bands. Very few are as sly with lyrics and as versatile as the Beatles were. The Stones may be sexier, but their songbook tends to sound the same. There's not much risk there. Same with The Who, Pink Floyd, the Ramones, Oasis, Cold Play...I will binge a musicians or bands albums and get bored after a bit - because by the tenth album, I realize they sound the same. The really good ones, don't. David Bowie, Prince, Lady Gaga, The Beatles all come to mind. At times you'll listen to two of their songs back to back and wonder if you are listening to someone else entirely. That's why I think Lady Gaga is a better singer than say Madonna -- her songs change. Her range is broader. It's also why Aretha Franklin is more interesting than say Whitney Houston or Diana Ross.
Or Emmy Lou Harris fascinates me more than Dolly Parton as a performer -- Dolly's song-writing is another story. Or why Johnny Cash lives on in the imagination over say a Mel Tillis.
Versatility is hard to do well. And the Beatles excelled at it. Don't believe me, listen to Revolver, Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, Yellow Submarine, and the White Album back to back some time.
The other thing they excelled at? Merging musical styles - from blues to rock to folk to country and back again. Even ministral and a capella. They also liked to experiment with sound - and could find what worked within that.
Few bands have accomplished this. I'm trying to think of other's that have? Possibly Queen? No, I've listened to Queen's albums back to back, the instrumentation is generally the same. By the way - I think John Williams stole from Queen to do Superman theme to the film Superman. Every time the Queen song with it comes on -- I think I'm listening to it.
Now, if I could just get my sugar levels down -- probably help if I stopped buying and eating chocolate bares and chocolate covered marshmellow eggs. What can I say? Stress drives me to eat chocolate.
2. Twitter
Stephen King
stephenking·
55m
The Hachette decision to drop the Woody Allen book makes me very uneasy. It's not him; I don't give a damn about Mr. Allen. It's who gets muzzled next that worries me.
Mixed. Censorship is not a good idea. But are they? I mean, Mr. Allen has enough money that he could always self-publish. I published non-traditionally as did other members of my family. And I know a lot of other people who are. The publishing industry rejects submissions all the time.
So is this really the same as muzzeling or censoring. Ponders.
I tweeted a response that no one will notice or even read. I'm kind of non-exsitent to the masses on Twitter and I want to keep it that way. Why people want to be popular or seen on social media is beyond me. It always makes me nervous.
"Replying to
stephenkingIs it censorship though? Ponders. With the internet - there's so many ways, cheap ones, to publish your own work now. Also, publishers reject writers books all the time for all sorts of reasons. Do we scream at them for censorship for rejecting our work or anyone's?"
[ETA: He deleted the entry? LOL! ETA2: No apparently the account and set up another one? Twitter is weird.]
I don't think it is.
Also responded to Courtney Milan's tweet:
Courtney Milan
T-Rex
courtneymilan·
23m
I would have more sympathy for arguments that Woody Allen was getting censored because a publisher won’t put out his book if there weren’t large groups of people who are getting excluded entirely from publishing in their entirety.
Replying to
courtneymilanIs it censorship though? I've independently published, as have most of my family and friends. Why? cough* publishing industry* cough. Should everyone who has had a novel or story or non-fictional work rejected - scream censorship? Because there is a lot of us...
[ETA: Her response? "It isn't censorship. That's why I said what I said." Seriously? How rude. My response: "Thank you for the clarification. Sorry I misunderstood." It's official, I'll stop buying her books and I've stopped following her. Note? If you are making your living writing romance novels, it's probably not a good idea to be snarky and attack people who respond to your posts on Twitter -- they very well may be your readers, the people reading your books and rec'ing them to others. She's not changing the world - I do more daily than she does. What she's doing is alienating people including those who agree with her. This happens a lot on social media. We get cranky and forget there's another person on the other side. We're not just writing messages in a bottle or to pixels, but actual people, who have feelings and fears and concerns and anxieties and bad days. If you are a successful artist (novelist, actor, filmmaker, etc) who depend on other to buy your work or look at it, then it behooves you not to alienate your audience. Then you won't have an audience and will be railing off all by yourself. I get that it's hard. I do it too. But I'm not making a living as a novelist. I was reminded tonight of why it is important to be careful with words.]
They are both going to ignore me. [ETA: unfortunately they didn't.] Why? I'm not important. I'm glad I'm not important. I do not want to be important. I want them to ignore me. Why? Famous people scare me. Fame = narcissism. [ETA: Yep, proof provided.]
What's this story all about? Woody Allen wrote a memoir. Little Brown and Company decided to publish it. Half their work force walked out in protest. They changed their minds. It's hardly the first time this has happened. I wouldn't celebrate it necessarily as an achievement in publishing. They didn't do it because it was the right thing to do, but because they got afraid of how they would appear to the masses and court of public opinion. Also the folks who walked out? They have a supplemental income via spouses, family, etc. I know I've met them. And I've interviewed and worked in publishing - you don't that much. It's called the glamour jobs for a reason.
3. Ah a NASA Photo of the Galaxies far far away...
NASA Photo on Twitter
4. The Age of Envy - How to be Happy When Everyone Else's Life Looks Perfect
We live in the age of envy. Career envy, kitchen envy, children envy, food envy, upper arm envy, holiday envy. You name it, there’s an envy for it. Human beings have always felt what Aristotle defined in the fourth century BC as pain at the sight of another’s good fortune, stirred by “those who have what we ought to have” – though it would be another thousand years before it would make it on to Pope Gregory’s list of the seven deadly sins.
But with the advent of social media, says Ethan Kross, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan who studies the impact of Facebook on our wellbeing, “envy is being taken to an extreme”. We are constantly bombarded by “Photoshopped lives”, he says, “and that exerts a toll on us the likes of which we have never experienced in the history of our species. And it is not particularly pleasant.”
Clinical psychologist Rachel Andrew says she is seeing more and more envy in her consulting room, from people who “can’t achieve the lifestyle they want but which they see others have”. Our use of platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, she says, amplifies this deeply disturbing psychological discord. “I think what social media has done is make everyone accessible for comparison,” she explains. “In the past, people might have just envied their neighbours, but now we can compare ourselves with everyone across the world.” Windy Dryden, one of the UK’s leading practitioners of cognitive behavioural therapy, calls this “comparisonitis”.
And those comparisons are now much less realistic, Andrew continues: “We all know that images can be filtered, that people are presenting the very best take on their lives.” We carry our envy amplification device around in our pockets, we sleep with it next to our pillows, and it tempts us 24 hours a day, the moment we wake up, even if it is the middle of the night. Andrew has observed among her patients that knowing they are looking at an edited version of reality, the awareness that #nofilter is a deceitful hashtag, is no defence against the emotional force of envy. “What I notice is that most of us can intellectualise what we see on social media platforms – we know that these images and narratives that are presented aren’t real, we can talk about it and rationalise it – but on an emotional level, it’s still pushing buttons. If those images or narratives tap into what we aspire to, but what we don’t have, then it becomes very powerful.”
To explore the role that envy plays in our use of social media, Kross and his team designed a study to consider the relationship between passive Facebook use – “just voyeuristically scrolling,” as he puts it – and envy and mood from moment to moment. Participants received texts five times a day for two weeks, asking about their passive Facebook use since the previous message, and how they were feeling in that moment. The results were striking, he says: “The more you’re on there scrolling away, the more that elicits feelings of envy, which in turn predicts drops in how good you feel”.
No age group or social class is immune from envy, according to Andrew. In her consulting room she sees young women, self-conscious about how they look, who begin to follow certain accounts on Instagram to find hair inspiration or makeup techniques, and end up envying the women they follow and feeling even worse about themselves. But she also sees the same pattern among older businessmen and women who start out looking for strategies and tips on Twitter, and then struggle to accept what they find, which is that some people seem to be more successful than they are. “Equally, it can be friends and family who bring out those feelings of envy, around looks, lifestyle, careers and parenting – because somebody is always doing it better on social media,” she says. How much worse would it have been for Shakespeare’s Iago, who says of Cassio: “He hath a daily beauty in his life / That makes me ugly,” if he had been following his lieutenant on Instagram?
While envying other people is damaging enough, “We have something even more pernicious, I think,” the renowned social psychologist Sherry Turkle tells me. “We look at the lives we have constructed online in which we only show the best of ourselves, and we feel a fear of missing out in relation to our own lives. We don’t measure up to the lives we tell others we are living, and we look at the self as though it were an other, and feel envious of it.” This creates an alienating sense of “self-envy” inside us, she says. “We feel inauthentic, curiously envious of our own avatars.”
The last paragraph of the above excerpt struck me as the most interesting, everything else I already knew:
“We have something even more pernicious, I think,” the renowned social psychologist Sherry Turkle tells me. “We look at the lives we have constructed online in which we only show the best of ourselves, and we feel a fear of missing out in relation to our own lives. We don’t measure up to the lives we tell others we are living, and we look at the self as though it were an other, and feel envious of it.” This creates an alienating sense of “self-envy” inside us, she says. “We feel inauthentic, curiously envious of our own avatars.”
I wonder about this. There's a movement in psychology that if you only post postive things or only write positive things - this will in turn attract positive things to you and result in only positive thoughts. I don't agree with this perspective. You can't erase negative thinking or judge it -- all it does is make it more ingrained. And repressing it - is not much better.
It's better to own the negativity, let go of it, and watch it float by like leaves on a stream. Denying you have any -- means you are bottling it up -- and at some point you will explode.
But I know a lot of shrinks and new age therapists who swear by it. I don't know if it helps them or not. It's never worked for me.
I do however agree that social media - in particular facebook, twitter, and instagram tend to trigger envy or foster it. Dreamwidth less so -- because most people on it don't tend to talk that much about their accomplishments, or how great they are constantly. Instead it's mainly fanfic, television reviews, meta, movie reviews, book reviews or personal journaling. There's less..."Bragging" and "Self-Promotion" -- possibly because we're all under aliases? (Shrugs). It's just the least narcissistic of the social media platforms I've interacted on.
5. How the Beatles Wrote the song A Day in the Life
“A Day in the Life” makes me appreciate how close John and Paul were, how well they understood and appreciated each other as artists, how their songs came from an oscillating process of writerly separation and then joining together. It makes me see them as a little universe of invention—all those vivid images and internal rhymes turned out as casually as woodworkers with a lathe. In this respect, it’s “A Day in the Life” of a songwriting team, working alone, coming together by delivering parts to each other’s houses, helping, suggesting, competing, vitiating, and then improving, pushing each other even as each offers his own view of things. Which is exactly how they both described the writing of “A Day in the Life.”
They were different. John was sly and scathing and quick, the dark-side observer at a remove. Paul was more optimistic, taking in the bright-size of life, deeply melodic, organized, romantic, and not so funny. The song conveys some of those differences in the middle verse with Paul’s bouncy fragment of autobiography—an adolescent schoolboy waking up from a deep sleep and muzzily getting ready to catch the bus—bending toward the existential meditations of John. (When Paul runs for the bus, John supplies the heavy breathing.) The beat is now peppy with drum and snatches of piano, a common Beatles rhythm. Nothing could be more banal, getting from bed to bus, just another day in the life caught in eight perfect lines.
And then he’s smoking (something) and we are back into a (cosmic) dream, back to John with his newspaper. And what does he find? A government tally of imperfections in the surface of English roads. John’s mention of Blackburn, Lancashire, gives the song the advantage of a memorably specific place name that is in service of a more general emotion—one of those strange alchemies that just happens to work in music. Think: Paul Simon’s Saginaw in “America” or Jackson Browne’s Winslow, Arizona, in “Take It Easy” or Neil Young’s Redwood in “Heart of Gold.” That the government really was out there in Blackburn, Lancashire, and counting potholes, was the sort of activity that appealed to Lennon’s absurdist northern sense of humor.
What did it all add up to? Four thousand! What did it all really add up to? A nonsense line about the relationship between holes and Royal Albert Hall’s seating capacity. Except decay, holes, people as holes, emptiness, and audience—it’s another mystery almost seen. The feeling is rather sad. These vocal sections were written and recorded first, with the empty linking section between the first John and Paul verses counted off bar by bar. To fill the empty space, they drew on their producer George Martin’s vast musical knowledge. John wanted “a musical orgasm.” Soon enough, half an orchestra of leading London classical musicians was assembled at Abbey Road Studios with instructions to play their instruments from lowest note to highest, navigating the allotted bars at their own pace. George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” begins with something similar, a solo clarinet glissando that was itself improvised at a rehearsal by the musician. In “A Day in the Life,” the idea was that the orchestra would slide up the scale micro-tonally, a free-form crescendo of accumulating pitches.
That recording session became a ’60s happening, with Beatles’ friends like members of the Rolling Stones and the Monkees and their sexy wives and girlfriends (like Pattie Boyd and Marianne Faithfull) turning out in the trippy regalia of the time. The orchestra wore proper dress-performance clothes. The Beatles handed out novelty-shop gag items: clown noses (for the very upstanding violins), plastic spectacles (for the more ebullient woodwinds and brass), wigs, balloons, whistles.
Yep, the Beatles continue to be among my all-time favorite bands. Very few are as sly with lyrics and as versatile as the Beatles were. The Stones may be sexier, but their songbook tends to sound the same. There's not much risk there. Same with The Who, Pink Floyd, the Ramones, Oasis, Cold Play...I will binge a musicians or bands albums and get bored after a bit - because by the tenth album, I realize they sound the same. The really good ones, don't. David Bowie, Prince, Lady Gaga, The Beatles all come to mind. At times you'll listen to two of their songs back to back and wonder if you are listening to someone else entirely. That's why I think Lady Gaga is a better singer than say Madonna -- her songs change. Her range is broader. It's also why Aretha Franklin is more interesting than say Whitney Houston or Diana Ross.
Or Emmy Lou Harris fascinates me more than Dolly Parton as a performer -- Dolly's song-writing is another story. Or why Johnny Cash lives on in the imagination over say a Mel Tillis.
Versatility is hard to do well. And the Beatles excelled at it. Don't believe me, listen to Revolver, Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, Yellow Submarine, and the White Album back to back some time.
The other thing they excelled at? Merging musical styles - from blues to rock to folk to country and back again. Even ministral and a capella. They also liked to experiment with sound - and could find what worked within that.
Few bands have accomplished this. I'm trying to think of other's that have? Possibly Queen? No, I've listened to Queen's albums back to back, the instrumentation is generally the same. By the way - I think John Williams stole from Queen to do Superman theme to the film Superman. Every time the Queen song with it comes on -- I think I'm listening to it.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-07 01:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-07 02:57 am (UTC)(I saw every episode of the Monkees about ten times. There wasn't that many episodes and I was obsessed with it as a child. I got obsessed with odd shows as a child - Battle of the Planets, Kimba, HnH PuffnStuff, Battle Star Galatica, and The Monkees. Also Batman and Robin. Very odd.)
no subject
Date: 2020-03-07 02:13 am (UTC)But that's twitter for ya. The overstatements, the hyperbole.
Hm, I hadn't thought of Parton as performer separate from Parton as songwriter. But it's a good point: she's a talented songwriter whose performances are a bit too... similar, I guess. A downside of having a distinct vocal style, perhaps.
Emmy Lou Harris can bring me to tears with "Gulf Coast Highway." I don't even know why; just something about the way she performs that very slight song is moving.
I wonder how durable Taylor Swift's music will be. Incredibly catchy, even if it's mundane, and Swift knows how to cater to her not-extensive vocal range. But so much of her pop music sounds the same.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-07 02:53 am (UTC)But that's twitter for ya. The overstatements, the hyperbole.
Sigh. Yes. Also their snark isn't as funny as they think it is. Everything is exaggerated on twitter. Part of the problem is it really pushes the whole one-liner thing, and is more of a marketing/promotional platform than truly an informational sharing or connection based platform. It also reminds me alot of IM chat and not in a good way.
she's a talented songwriter whose performances are a bit too... similar, I guess.
I figured it out when I started listening to her songs sung by others. I Will Always Love You is an example. So too, is Here We Come Again. And
then 9 to 5. She's very versatile. We also have Lolene in there.
Harris has more range in her vocal chords - she's not twangy, and yeah she brings me to tears as well.
I wonder how durable Taylor Swift's music will be. Incredibly catchy, even if it's mundane, and Swift knows how to cater to her not-extensive vocal range. But so much of her pop music sounds the same.
Agreed. Her songs do sound the same. She reminds me a lot of Britiny Spears.
I listened to a bunch of them once on Apple Music, and got bored halfway through. Same inflection, same chords, and same beat. The words change but not much else really does.
The other problem? All her songs, without exception are either about her boyfriend being an asshole to her, breaking up with him, or people being hateful to her for whatever reason. So...by the tenth song, she sounds a bit whiny and I want to smack her. LOL!
That said she does have some interesting songs that may have considerable mileage. "Mean" is an interesting concept song. As is, "Look What You Made Me Do" (which may not be as good as I thought since I had to look it up having blanked on the title). That song reminds me a bit of "Oops, I did it Again" in how it's sung and the vocalization. Although it's far more advanced politically speaking, and far more feminist, while Oops is really not.
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Date: 2020-03-07 04:44 am (UTC)Sandy Denny, either solo work or with Fairport Convention, Paul Simon, Suzanne Vega, Bruce Cockburn, Joni Mitchell, Leo Kottke, Joan Armatrading, Kate Bush, The Moody Blues, The Pentangle, Counting Crows, REM (not the most recent work, but otherwise), Richard Thompson, Roseanne Cash, Chris Isaak, Dire Straits
And an interpreter rather than a composer, but one of the very, very best... Linda Ronstadt. Stunning voice, equally stunning rang of musical forms she could interpret.
That'll do for now! :-)
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Date: 2020-03-07 02:45 pm (UTC)My difficulty with many of them, with the possible exclusion of Paul Simon who kept redefining himself, is their songs sound the same after a bit. I love them - love Joni Mitchell, but it's hard sometimes to tell the songs apart outside of the lyrics. I can't binge their albums. Also for most of those...there's a few great songs, and a lot of mediocre ones. Hence the difficulty for longevity, I think.
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Date: 2020-03-08 12:35 am (UTC)Denny and Thompson were two of the guiding forces behind British folk rock giants, Fairport Convention, during their prime period (1967-69).
I would recommend any of their albums together: What We Did on Our Holiday, Unhalfbricking or Liege and Lief. Unhalfbricking contains the best version of Denny's signature song, "Who Knows Where the Time Goes." (Many wonderful covers of that tune, Judy Collins' being the most famous.)
Solo? All of Denny's solo LPs are...good, with great material mixed in. The 3-cd anthology, named for that signature tune, is phenomenal.
Thompson? His best album, 1992's Rumor and Sigh, is flawless. (Thompson's signature song, "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" is an epic folk song in the grand tradition.)
You also might want to check out "Shoot Out the Lights", his 1981 "our-marriage-has-gone-to-hell album" with soon to be ex-wife, Linda. Superlative guitar work. Harrowing drama. Mesmerizing.
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Date: 2020-03-08 05:17 am (UTC)Lyrics of the brilliant Richard Thompson tune he mentioned:
Says Red Molly, to James, "Well that's a fine motorbike.
A girl could feel special on any such like."
Says James, to Red Molly, "My hat's off to you.
It's a Vincent Black Lightning, 1952.
And I've seen you on the corners and cafes, it seems.
Red hair and black leather, my favorite color scheme."
And he pulled her on behind,
And down to Boxhill,
They'd Ride.
Says James, to Red Molly, "Here's a ring for your right hand.
But I'll tell you in earnest I'm a dangerous man;
For I've fought with the law since I was seventeen.
I've robbed many a man to get my Vincent machine.
And now I'm twenty-one years, I might make twenty-two.
And I don't mind dyin' but for the love of you.
But if fate should break my stride, then I'll give you my Vincent, To Ride."
"Come down Red Molly, " called Sargent McQuade.
"For they've taken young James Aidee for Armed Robbery.
Shotgun blast hit his chest, left nothing inside.
Oh, come down, Red Molly, to his dying bedside."
When she came to the hospital, there wasn't much left.
He was runnin' out of road. He was runnin' out of breath.
But he smiled, to see her cry.
And said, "I'll give you my Vincent.
To Ride."
Said James, "In my opinion, there's nothing in this world
Beats a '52 Vincent and a Redheaded girl.
Now Nortons and Indians and Greavses won't do.
Oh, they don't have a Soul like a Vincent '52."
Well he reached for her hand and he slipped her the keys.
He said, "I've got no further use...for these.
I see Angels on Ariels in leather and chrome,
Swoopin' down from Heaven to carry me home."
And he gave her one last kiss and died.
And he gave her his Vincent.
To Ride.
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Date: 2020-03-08 01:01 pm (UTC)I think it's a testament to Thompson's consistent brilliance as an artist that he can record what's come to be his "signature song" 25 years into his career.
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Date: 2020-03-08 02:20 pm (UTC)Reminds me of various others I've listened to over the years. But doesn't really stand out and make me want to purchase his albums.
Here's the thing? I lived with a bunch of folk singers in a folklore theme house, my junior year of college. Even was romantically involved with one of them. And briefly took up the guitar to attempt to strum along - and tried to sing and play all those folks songs myself - I have no musical ability. I've heard and watched them all play and sing these songs. My boyfriend in college was a music critic and folk-singer, who played and still does acoustic guitar. He's even released a couple of country music albums. (Not very good.) And one of our professors - played folk guitar and did a capella with his wife. And..my roommate had an amazing voice and played guitar, she wrote her own songs and sang as well. (She's now a professor of Shakespear and Middle English in Colorado.) Her voice reminded me of Mary Travers.
All of them were amazing, and you haven't ever heard of them. The only one who has released broadly was Sand Sheff, and his songs are unique. I haven't heard anyone sing anything like them.
I used to host a music night or open mic night in college, where people would come up and sing and play guitar. And my boyfriend ran an accoustic music night -- where he'd invite people like Michael Hedges to play.