Watching people learn instruments, it is hard not to wonder whether some of the beauty of playing lies in the simple fact of its being done — a fact wildly underrepresented in digital music.
There is in digital music the fact of things being conceived. But moment-for-moment facts, unpaste-able, in real contact, making sensual sense, showing failures of memory and understanding, showing self-consciousness… such things are harder.
The unexamined life and the examined life need each other. Spending all on one’s time in examination deletes the subject.
A passing thought after hearing ‘Pornographic Mind’ as broadcast by the New York Times in a pop review. Pornography is always around the corner of this discussion… the imitation or concept of contact. Which drives contact, I suppose.