March 31, 2007 (link)

11:45 PM

I don't like to let a month go by with nothing at all, so here's three somethings:

• First, an epiphany I had on an extremely foggy night earlier this year, driving down the road near my house and approaching the scene of a minor accident. There were a couple of police cars there, and I noticed how uncannily beautiful their lights looked through the fog, setting the mist ablaze with flickering reds and blues. And then, I said to myself, aha:
  
  "Fog is the visual equivalent of reverb."
  
  Not a new insight by any means, nor a particularly deep one, but there it is.
  
  
• Second, I'd always thought they were singing "Counterrevolution, counterrevolution". Which I thought was brilliant: end the record with self-undermining irony, singing the battle cry of the reactionaries and making a mordant point about the nature of revolution (more "Meet the new boss", I thought, than "You can count me out...in...").
  
  But no, it's just "Got a revolution, got to revolution". Sigh.
  
  
• And third:
  
  "There are those who go so far as to argue that sketch studies, in their attempts to come to grips with musical structure, exclude other avenues of research. Philip Bohlman believes that 'by using the analysis of chord progressions to show that a passage in Beethoven has nothing to do with sexuality but everything to do with a set of obvious, though still brilliant, compositional decisions, we continue to keep the body out of Western music.'"
  -- Hurley, Handel's Muse, p. 1-2
  

And to that last, I say...well, what can I say, really? Except to mumble something vague about "seemingly limitless narcissism" and slink back to my garret, I guess.

Current music: Jefferson Airplane - "It's No Secret"
(This has been the Best Song Ever lately; see the video here, including rare footage of Signe Anderson)

(Comments for March 31, 2007)

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Le Peau du Chagrin, Balzac

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