Tales from the Bitface

I was going to open this with the old “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” quote, and did a search to find the attribution for it; only to discover that nobody seems to be quite sure.  There is a page where the possibilities are detailed, though.

I’ve always liked to mentally twist the meaning of that quote, and imagine people dancing around a piece of architecture. But I mention it now because I’m beginning to think it might hold a lot of truth, for me at least.

I’ve spent a lot of my time reading about music, though: all through the punk years I bought Sounds; then after a hiatus while at university I read the NME in the late eighties and all through the nineties. Even today, I read Uncut from time to time (growing up means switching from a weekly to a monthly schedule: discuss). As well as that, I’ve read a number of musical biographies: The Beatles, The Doors, The Velvet Underground, The Clash, The Stones…

So reading about music is commonplace to me. Why, then, should I suddenly begin to doubt the worth of writing about it?

Well, it’s this here Open University course I’m three weeks into.  A103, “An Introduction to the Humanities” covers an unfeasibly broad set of subjects, of course.  The idea is to give us a grounding in various disciplines, and the tools with which to learn to study them.

So far we’ve looked at art history, literature (in the form of the sonnet) and this week, music.

Trouble is, while I found it fairly easy to write about art, and even easier to write about literature (that’s why I signed up in the first place, as I may not have made entirely clear back there), writing about music is another matter entirely, I’m discovering.

It’s not that I don’t have the vocabulary: as well as what I know from general knowledge, and what I’ve learned in more years than I care to remember bashing a guitar, I’ve picked up enough in the last week or so to be able to discuss timbre and tempo and texture with the best of them (the best of them in my tutor group, anyway).  No, the problem is that I don’t find music evokes in me the images that other say it does.  Yeah, I can tell when a piece is dramatic or sad, for example.  But when in tonight’s tutorial they played a piece that everyone who commented said made them think of water in some form (except for the woman from Israel who said it reminded her of her national anthem), I just thought it was a kind of not-very-interesting swooshy piece.  It was, in fact, supposed to represent a river — it was a “tone poem“, apparently.

Maybe I’m unimaginative; but the problem for me, really, is the lack of words.  It’s always been words that have drawn me to songs — in combination with the music, of course: the best words in the world could be ruined by a crappy tune or insipid performance.

But not completely ruined.

I have concluded that most of the reading about music I listed above was actually rather about musicians.  Which is fair enough, but doesn’t help much.

None of this is to say that I haven’t enjoyed the music section so far; just that it’s more challenging than the rest.

But which blows my punk credentials more: having to listen to Hildegard of Bingen or Jethro Tull?

Next week: philosophy.  In the meantime I’m off to compare and contrast St Paul’s Cathedral and the Millennium Bridge by means of interpretive dance.

I am wildly amused by this Microsoft Knowledge Base entry, as linked by BoingBoing.  To Microsoft, then, it’s an acceptable solution to browser security problems, to tell us to type in URLs instead of clicking on links:

The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself. By manually typing the URL in the address bar, you can verify the information that Internet Explorer uses to access the destination Web site. To do so, type the URL in the Address bar, and then press ENTER.

As BoingBoing suggests, a far, far better solution is to download Mozilla; or Firebird; or Opera; or even Netscape, FFS.

They’re all much better browsers anyway, even without this nonsense.

Damn, just let it go past midnight, so didn’t manage three posts in a day.

Bob Mould has a blog.  You probably all knew this already, but I only learned it yesterday.  Pop over and have a look.

One very interesting link I found via Bob; you should read this post if you’re at all interested in blogging.  Or punk rock.

Two posts in one day.  Wow.

… smells like whitewash to me.

As I watched the details unfold on the The Guardian‘s website yesterday, I began to get a bad feeling about it; and now the details are out, I ask myself this: Hutton is already a lord; what is he getting out of making the government look squeaky-clean?

Now, it’s clear the the BBC screwed up: Gilligan’s first report was overstated, and the management and governors could have investigated its accuracy while still supporting him. A correction, or even retraction, and an apology in the first day or two, and it might all have blown over.

But none of that explains or excuses the dodgy dossier.

Maybe Blair didn’t know the intelligence was bad (can intelligence be stupid? Discuss). But it was bad, there’s no doubt about that; and Hutton seems to have just excused himself from looking at that area at all. True, his brief was to investigate David Kelly’s death; but that death was inextricably linked with the evidence that was used to justify Britain going to war, and by failing to look at that, Hutton has let us all down.

It’s such a shame, especially since the enquiry itself seemed such a model of openness for the Internet Age.