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Mindless

"There is too much noise", my guru Pandit Dilip Chandra Vedi said on his deathbed. And it only got worse over the past decades. People buy machines for doing things and then they have to put those machines to work. Grass mowers, hole drillers, electric saws, hedge trimmers. They love noise. Ghetto blasters and car-radios with power woofers. There is too much mindlessness. People do things before they think about it. They say things before they think about it. They don't think. They are mindless, most of the time. Perhaps [...]

Mindless2021-05-22T10:36:45+02:00

On (de-)polarisation

and if today its poetry is white it is very black at heart Samba da Benção, Baden Powell e Vinícius de Moraes Recent events, leading to the impressive Black Lives Matter movement, even got our prime minister to reflect on racism in the Netherlands. Quite something, because he is proud of not having a vision and restricting himself to function as CEO of Netherlands Inc. One had the feeling that something was really happening finally. But as soon as Zwarte Piet (the blackface attendant of Saint Nicholas) came into the [...]

On (de-)polarisation2020-06-23T09:05:34+02:00

Against Facebook

I joined Facebook soon after it started, back in 2004. It seemed like a wonderful idea, setting up a community, communicating easily with friends and colleagues. Less work than a blog, more charming than email or text messages. In 2008 I left. It is not so easy to get out of that cobweb. But I managed. And some of my friends and colleagues did the same. I forgot about it, didn't need it for anything. Then recently it became clear that facebook isn't just annoying and useless but it is [...]

Against Facebook2020-06-22T08:58:06+02:00

La Musique Barbare

Hell is other people's music  Paraphrasing Kristeva – the barbarian is the subject whose music is so unknown to us that it doesn’t even appear to be music. It sounds like “noise”.  The question of cross- or transcultural listening to music is hopelessly confused. Moreover, we can extend this problem to cross-subcultural listening and also historical listening. When the journalist Momus noted:  ‘Hell,’ said Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘is other people’. I'd qualify that slightly. People are fine; it's their music that's hell”, he was talking about a subcultural issue: “When I [...]

La Musique Barbare2020-06-22T08:43:27+02:00
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