The Packbats' Weblog

So, we just watched an old TED talk - "The transformative power of classical music" by Benjamin Zander, you can look it up if you're bored - arguing that everyone likes classical music, and I feel like there's ... four assumptions? it made that we can't vibe with.

Like, the first assumption is that we need to be convinced that everyone likes classical music, but we'll get back to that.

The second assumption is that everyone always prefers a lively and excited performance to one that is more understated and subtle, which, whatever, I don't care - if one-buttock playing is just how Benjamin Zander plays, so be it.

The third assumption is that people who don't listen to classical music are sitting it out because they don't care about classical music. Like, y'all know how much of the world got fucked over by western European nations to make a tiny portion of folks from western Europe rich, right? Their culture can't escape being the culture of colonizers and oligarchs, so folks are gonna react to that.

The fourth assumption is that music in the western European classical tradition is somehow distinctive in this regard.

Like, okay, yes, Frédéric Chopin's Prelude No. 4 in E Minor is a lovely, heartbreaking piece of music. Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" is a lovely, heartbreaking piece of music. Bea Miller's "feel something" is beautiful and desperate. MUNA's "Around U" is beautiful and lost. Andy G. Cohen's "Oxygen Mask" is overwhelming, powerful, perhaps despairing. Erik Satie's Gymnopédie No. 1 is agonizing, we actually have to turn it off because it hurts so much. We're talking about music here - if you're talking about music and people loving music, you can find music to love.

...because we're not even arguing with Benjamin Zander. We're arguing with the tradition that Benjamin Zander is participating in, of campaigning for classical music.

Like, does Zander know that classical music isn't music? He talks about a scourge of bland, technically accurate performances, then launches into playing a piece he loves with passion, intention, and understanding, and he thinks he's demonstrating that classical music is good. Music is good, my dude! People love the music you play because you're playing them music!

But classical music is a performance by the audience, of class. It is class-ical music. It's allowed to be boring garbage because, to paraphrase early (worse) xkcd, it's about getting some culture in you - and white culture is allowed to be terrible, to be bland and technically accurate, because white oligarchs can pay to have everyone taught that it's great anyway, that everyone should have it in them.

We found Zander's talk in the least charitable context possible. We found it via an Innuendo Studios video about "smart music" - about music you play to show that you have drunk deep the well of colonizer oligarch culture, and that therefore you are worth listening to. Because, in part thanks to Zander and Zander wanting people to love classical music, Chopin's Prelude No. 4 in E Minor makes the list.

I wish he'd been trying to teach people to love music instead. I really do. But the TED people wouldn't have paid him for that, because when the audience is paying six thousand dollars a year to be here, the speakers better be selling something exciting to rich people, and rich people don't want to be told that the problem with classical music is them.

(thread)

okay, no, actually, I think it's actively harmful when a page is intended to display static information - text and images you can't edit - and requires javascript to do it

any website building tool which functions that way is actively doing harm

no we will not explain

yes, we hate these things because they're rubbish

but we hate them more because they're born out of indifference and callousness at best, and active hostility at worst

(original thread version on Weirder Earth, a Mastodon instance using the Hometown fork. Lightly edited.)

"mastodon" is spelled "mastadon" because the 'o' there is reduced to schwa and 'a' is the most schwa-like vowel letter in English. Same thing behind "definite" and "definate" - a schwa got spelled with an 'a', it's phonetic as hell. It sucks when it's in a hashtag because that splits the hashtag, but mostly it doesn't matter which you use - it's just an "uh" sound, it's the most generic sound possible.

Anyway all writing is a lie, if people understand you then you succeeded, go push the grammaticasters into a pool and live your life.

Sorry, that was kind of judgey.

What you're feeling when you cringe at "mastadon" is damage that was done to you. It is all the people who fucked you up because it was more important to them that you looked like a rich white person than that you survived intact - probably because they got fucked up the same way, because that's what generational trauma is. It fucking sucks and I get it.

But the answer to generational trauma isn't to pass it on, it's to heal.

And everyone knows what "mastadon" is. It's the "calling all photocopers xeroxes" word for the microblogging side of fedi.

20 year old Packbats: I know I'm on the Internet, but I'm going to spell everything correctly, with proper grammar, because that's just the kind of man I am!

37 year old Packbats: I'm not a man and spelling is fake and that makes me really mad because "actually, 'muchly' has been a part of English since the 1620s" is a really cool historical fact and completely irrelevant to why this jackass needs to shut the fuck up about our grammar

(yes, we're still bitter about the person who said that "thanks muchly!" was incorrect to us last year - they knew exactly what we meant, they were able to paraphrase it perfectly)

(don't be like that person, thank you and we appreciate it)

Addendum the next morning:

We care about this because that "you must spell it this way" damage isn't just a thing for those of us who do spell it the way we're told, it's a thing for those of us who can't.

Like, listen: we suck at remembering names, they slide right out of our head, they're arbitrary sounds and they barely come up most of the time ... and for a lot of people, that's spellings of words.

Plus there's disabilities affecting writing.

Plus there's differences of education.

And the thing about mocking people who don't spell it the way they "must" is that that mockery always always always lands on those who can't, over and over and over, and is used as justification for shutting down anything they have to say.

It has a discriminatory impact.

It marginalizes people.

Addendum 2: everything we know about schwas we know from that one Language Files video from two years ago. Shoutout to Tom Scott, Molly Ruhl, and Gretchen McCulloch.

(Emeto content warning on video for brief comment+animation about almost throwing up.)

There are few tools as good as photography at documenting what is there. The camera almost inevitably captures an enormous wealth of detail in that span of time when it admits light into its lens - photography can record the visual element of history with incredible speed, accuracy, and fidelity. This is something to be celebrated.

...but the capturing of images with a camera does not cease to be photography when it is used to other ends.

- 🐲

From baldanders, here and there:

Alan Grayson (D-FL) is my hero. Seriously, he tells it like it is, without fear of the insurance companies, and certainly not without fear of the Republican lie machine:

"We as a party have spent the last six months, the greatest minds in our party, dwelling on the question, the unbelievably consuming question of how to get Olympia Snowe to vote on health care reform. I want to remind us all that Olympia Snowe was not elected President last year. Olympia Snowe has no veto power in the Senate. Olympia Snowe represents a state with one half of one percent of America's population.

"What America wants is health care reform. America doesn't care if it gets 51 votes in the Senate or 60 votes in the Senate or 83 votes in the Senate, in fact America doesn't even care about that, it doesn't care about that at all. What America cares about is this; there are over 1 million Americans who go broke every single year trying to pay their health care bills. America cares a lot about that. America cares about the fact that there are 44,780 Americans who die every single year on account of not having health care, that's 122 every day. America sure cares a lot about that. America cares about the fact that if you have a pre-existing condition, even if you have health insurance, it's not covered. America cares about that a lot. America cares about the fact that you can get all the health care you need as long as you don't need any. America cares about that a lot. But America does not care about procedures, processes, personalities, America doesn't care about that at all." [. . .]

"Last week I held up this report here and I pointed out that in America there are 44,789 Americans that die every year according to this Harvard report published in this peer reviewed journal because they have no health insurance. That's an extra 44,789 Americans who die whose lives could be saved, and their response was to ask me for an apology." [. . .]

"Well, I'm telling you this; I will not apologize. I will not apologize. I will not apologize for a simple reason; America doesn't care about your feelings. [. . .] America does care about health care in America. And if you're against it, then get out of the way. You can lead, you can follow or you can get out of the way. [. . .] America understands that there is one party in this country that is favor of health care reform and one party that is against it, and they know why.

"They understand that if Barack Obama were somehow able to cure hunger in the world the Republicans would blame him for overpopulation. They understand that if Barack Obama could somehow bring about world peace they would blame him for destroying the defense industry. In fact, they understand that if Barack Obama has a BLT sandwich tomorrow for lunch, they will try to ban bacon.

"But that's not what America wants; America wants solutions to its problems, and that begins with health care."

Former 1960s radical Bill Ayers appeared (as himself) in the 2002 documentary The Weather Underground, which was narrated by Lili Taylor.

Taylor was in High Fidelity with Tim Robbins who was in The Hudsucker Proxy with Steve Buscemi.

And Steve Buscemi was in Tanner on Tanner with, yes, Barack Obama.

That's only four degrees of separation -- a closer connection than either The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times was able to establish in their exhaustive attempts to find any links between the former '60s radical and the current Democratic nominee for president.