josh blog

Ordinary language is all right.

One could divide humanity into two classes:
those who master a metaphor, and those who hold by a formula.
Those with a bent for both are too few, they do not comprise a class.

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12 Dec '02 04:15:22 PM

That is to say, not a lot, but at least some.

12 Dec '02 04:14:55 PM

I believe I have stated before how much I resent "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" being there.

8 Dec '02 01:47:55 AM

It is not uncommon in philosophy to suggest (or worse) that if a theory developed to explain or justify something is not able to preserve all of our pre-theoretical intuitions, this is just fine because some of those intuitions are wrong. I can't condone this for most of the things I'm interested in (questions about value, taste, meaning, pleasure, etc.) because in most cases the only reasons available to support the idea that these intuitions could be wrong are a) the attractiveness and desirability of an elegant theory uncluttered by its attempts to adequately take all intuitions into account, and b) intuitions we have been mislead into having by past theories which discounted the "wrong" intuitions.

I realize there is a circle here.

7 Dec '02 09:41:29 PM

A theory I have about Supa Dupa Fly but which I haven't decided about yet is that it about equally supports relaxed sleepy-head headnodding and jittery excitable twitching. I consider that pretty remarkable.

Oh, and I mean, in the same song, usually.

7 Dec '02 07:52:48 PM

Process.

21 Nov '02 03:52:47 PM

So I made Felicity a tape, and I made myself a copy of it, which I listened to in my office yesterday. In the past I've suspected that the stereo at home that I make tapes with was a little funny, but I'm much more convinced now. It doesn't happen regularly, but the tape deck in it must be running at the wrong speed, because when the tapes are played on other machines, they run fast. This one ran fast enough for things to sound a little weird, the entire time. It was a good kind of weird, though. I meant the tape to have a lot of punch to it, and a lot of the songs are fast or just keep up a good tempo. Since I know all of them, hearing them just slightly sped up (so that the pitches are off, but everything is more or less in the right places so it sounds more or less familiar) is like hearing them hopped up on goofballs after a night without sleep, or something: every single beat stays more exciting throughout, because my mental script for the songs would constantly have me following along more slowly than the actual sounds coming out of my speakers. I imagine that the effect would be lost if you didn't know the songs; my second time through it sounded less unusual, so I'm sure if I listened enough I'd get used to these tempos and then when I heard the songs properly elsewhere, or played the tape at home, everything would sound leaden and plodding. I think Felicity knows some of these songs, but not others. I wonder what the effect would be like if just a few scattered tracks sound fast.

20 Nov '02 05:04:26 AM

Suddenly this Bedhead song reminds me of Cracker. I find this distasteful.

19 Nov '02 07:26:07 AM

It may be interesting to note that I haven't listened to the last Spiritualized album since last February, as far as I can tell. Well, I find it interesting.

18 Nov '02 06:51:16 AM

The house thump: it's been a while since I thought about it. Today I went into the bathroom while Bodily Functions was still playing, loudly, in my room. The wall reduced the music to something more like the thump-thump-thump that's associated with the stereotypical picture of house music. So I wondered: huh, I never notice that now. I did a great deal, at one point. "Ignore" wasn't the right word there, because it's not ignoring. Later today I focused in on the beat on both some Herbert tracks and some tracks from Kompakt Total 4. My reaction was sort of... hard to describe. Something like "well of course the thump is right there". I think maybe Tim said something to me once about internalizing the beat, and that gets at what I'm thinking about. It's not just ignoring, because you need to be able to hear every other part in light of the beat.