Discretisation, Perfection, Standardisation and other Miseries

Holland (Nederland) is famous for its cheese. Nonsense. There is hardly any dutch cheese worthy of the name. Well, that is, if we are talking about typical dutch cheeses, because there are some very nice blue, red and white cheeses made there by enthusiasts. Typical dutch cheese like Gouda and Edam, or its farmhouse biological versions made with unpasteurised milk used to be highly diverse from one to the other. Sometimes they would be very pungent, with a strong smell of cows, stables, pastures, and the like. And they could [...]

Discretisation, Perfection, Standardisation and other Miseries2020-06-22T18:39:55+02:00

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 [...]

Mindless2020-06-26T07:07:02+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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