Did he lose his job anyway? Because that would be sweet.
Can't believe you're reading Potter articles, Ogged. The secrets are all out in the open now!
See what you Potter fans have wrought? People are acting as though Scholastic wields state authority because of its unilaterally declared embargo. This is how radicals are born: I used to be indifferent to HP, and now I want to freeway-blog spoilers.
The secrets are all out in the open now!
I've managed to remain unspoiled. And once I get home tonight, I'll try to re-read book six before seven arrives tomorrow. Woot!
You're going to reread book 6 in a night? You all are insane. I'm going out with McMegan tomorrow and she expects to be done with Harry Potter by the time we meet up. AT NOON.
Nah, I'm already about 250 pages into it.
ogged skeps thee vowels. too sieve tome end raid fester.
ogged, are you planning to read it as quickly as possible because you're worried someone will spoil it for you?
No, I'm planning to read it because I want to.
I'll try to re-read book six
Snape kills Dumbedore, lol
I'm not sure that's wait Woorangashire meant, ogged.
My problem is that I do the audiobook, which is like 30 hours, so it takes a lot longer to finish than skimming the book will for people who plan on doing the paper version.
That's no excuse, Becks. Read the book!
Audiobook?! Is that because you have so much travel time? (I can't get into audiobooks, though I often want to.)
Shut up, all of you. BELIEVE ME, I've already gotten enough crap about this from Matt F. I've done books 1-6 as audiobooks and I'm not about to change for book 7.
I'm going to text you spoilers on Monday, Becks.
i'm just going to watch the movies
i did download the last season of sopranos insteada waiting till it came out on dvd because i did'nt want to get spoiled
Audiobooks aren't so bad; they're nice on long car trips. Not that I would choose to listen to them on my own, given my known aversion to both reading books and listening to things.
22 - If you do that, I will find you and I will cockpunch you.
Heh. I still don't understand any of these euphemisms.
But listen. If you're really worried about spoilers, cannot you just avoid all media outlets for a few days? Sure you can.
As for the poor mail carrier, people have been sued for less. Or more. Hey! I wonder if Rowling's friends and acquaintances have to sign non-disclosure agreements!
he went back and asked the kids to return them ...
... and then sold them to the highest bidder. He lived happily ever after. The end.
Yeah, Becks, just don't read Unfogged for a couple of days. How hard is that?
I want you all to know that I have, today, acquired:
For me:
1. A pinkish tweedy suit.
2. A Laura Bush wig.
Already own: Ridiculous pink shoes, coral lipstick. I might just swing by CVS and pick up old lady pink, though.
For PK:
1. A container of orange/tangerine "Crystal Light" (Target only had cherry flavored Kool Aid).
2. A *hand knit* navy v-neck vest with a red stripe at the hem.
3. A white shirt.
4. A red tie (alas, not a rep tie, but you do what you can.)
5. A Gryffyndor robe.
6. Champagne party poppers (for safe indoor fireworks simulation).
Already own: Navy pants, a wand.
For Mr. B.:
1. A bushy black beard.
2. A brown tunic.
Already own: Desert suede combat boots, a thick brown belt from PK's pirate costume for Halloween, brown pants.
Now if the little shit would just *nap*, this might be a fun night.
I find it interesting that it's now almost literally unthinkable that Adorno could have been right about popular culture. Pop culture gains our loyalty at such a young age that it's hard to question its influence.
The hard thing with Adorno is that Louis Armstrong was one of the things he was denouncing. He was of the high German intelligentsia.
Adorno didn't live long enough to see the free jazz movement, did he?
He died in 1969, the year For Alto was released. The Shape of Jazz to Come is 1959 and Free Jazz the album is from 1960. Interstellar Space, to take a different sort of album, is from 1967.
Anyway, he certainly lived long enough for bebop. There was a joke about a bebop-playing big band, one of whose members operated a radar set, to warn the players if they were getting too close to a melody.
Bartok only lived in the US for about 4 years and was seriously sick for a year or more of that time (he died in 1945). Of all the great XXc composers he was the one most curious about non-classical music, and I'm sure that if he had lived he would have found the bebop / free jazz scene. He did write music for Benny Goodman, and some (possibly many) of the bebop and later guys listened to his music.
Robert Fripp was famously (well, maybe not famously) interested in Bartók.
This is a pretty cool album, featuring noted Emerson fave Don Cherry, and Krzysztof Penderecki, about whom Emerson has been suspiciously silent, and whose name the BBC misspells in two different ways.
Becks, Which audiobook version do you use. I love Stephen Fry and am sorry that the American edition is by some other guy.
I saw Penderecki live once, in Eugene (Holbo's home town). I made a special trip with my HS age son, and we got on the Portland bus home about 3 am after waiting for an hour surrounded by homeless stoners and schizophrenics.
I haven't read anything of Adorno's stuff on music and am in fact pretty damned ignorant about music despite dating a composer, so I will bow out of this thread.
I found the chapters on Adorno in Geuss's Morality, Culture and History extremely angrying up of the blood, but I haven't read anything of his either, I have to admit.
40: Was that for Credo at the Bach Festival, John?
Probably. It would have been around 1990. He packed the room, and the audience was appreciative except for one guy immediately behind me.
I recently found that true avant-gardists mistrust Penderecki because he's too concerned for the way his music sounds. Not a joke.
Have you heard Adorno's music? Said to be 2nd Vienna School kind of stuff, not surprisingly; I've never come across any.
Apparently Schoenberg told Adorno that he had no sense of rhythm. I imagine something architectonic and theoretical without much movement.
I tried to read parts of Adorno's book on music, but he's absolutely not my cup of tea. Music was smothered in the political-historical-philosophical-scientific undead blob.
The thought of Schoenberg taking the Miles Davis role in that exchange is amusing.
Gotta get your butt moving, Theo!
Wait, why does Adorno's choice of Louis Armstrong damn him?
Apparently Schoenberg told Adorno that he had no sense of rhythm.
This is wonderful.
If it had been Britney Spears I'd agree with him. I don't know who the 1930 Britney Spears was, but it wasn't Louis Armstrong.
On top of everything, Adorno, Schoenberg, and a lot of other refugees ended up in Hollywood being supported by cheesy music industry people. (Probably including Randy Newman's father and uncles, who were Germans who wrote movie music.) The pathos is pretty intense and I should probably sympathize more.
Adorno was killed by those awful, snotty college students who wrecked up his office and insulted him. He didn't live long after that happened. All those college students are probably Vice Presidents of Marketing or Assistant Ministers for Culture now too, I would bet--so many of the Euro-sixty-eight generation just plain sold the fuck out, didn't even do ordinary things to make a living but parlayed their class priviledge and education into corporate and government power. Bastards.
I like Adorno very much. He is a bad-tempered, opaque and fussy writer with a perpetual sense of grievance, so it's a natural fit. Although I like free jazz just about as much as I like him, and would find it difficult to choose if I could only like one.
Actually, Louis Armstrong versus Britney Spears makes an instructive case. As a child or teenager, people forms their attachments to pop culture. If those attachments make it to adulthood without seeming embarassing, they become lifelong loyalties. (If they don't survive to adulthood, they become the source of nostalgia.) Collectively, these form a ready-made canon of the monuments of pop culture. Britney Spears is an easy target, because almost no one maintains their attachment into adulthood. If Adorno is right about the evils of pop culture, he's right to target the Armstrongs and not the Spears.
Ok, then, my point is that Armstrong was not pop culture. He made a different kind of music that Adorno was unable to appreciate at any level. After about 1880 western music didn't know where it was going to go -- they were trying to escape from Wagner and Beethoven. Adorno thought that Schoenberg was the way, and the only way, but in many respects Schoenberg was just hyper-Wagner. The goddamn German seriousness. Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and so on brought a new style of music into being which was effectively classical. Germans confused the rules of a style with the laws of music.
I think for the purposes of my argument the key distinction is not quality but the way it fit into the culture. German classical music was initially created for aristocratic and haute bourgeois audiences. Jazz and everything later was created for mass audiences by a capitalist system. Jazz could be better than Mozart artistically, but it could still function as propaganda where Mozart did not.
Jazz was created by a capitalist system?
Also, Adorno began to formulate his ideas about jazz before he came to the US, and considered its development through a 19th and early 20th century European paradigm. It's fair to wonder how much he attempted to engage jazz as a thing in itself.
Adorno trivia from The New Grove: for a while in the late 30s, he wrote under the pseudonym Hektor Rottweiler; he sketched but never completed an opera called Der Schatz des Indianer-Joe, based on Huckleberry Finn.
In the same sense that w-lfs-n was created by a capitalist system.
I'm asking you to expand on that sense.
One would also like to point out that the circumstances of something's creation and its fitness at a later time for use as or in propaganda need have nothing to do with each other.
If I had time (which I don't right now) I would make an argument that Mozart was created by a late feudal system.
Someone made the interesting point here on Unfogged that most folk and blues musicians in their native element actually played a mixture of popular and "authentic" music, and that the aura of authenticity was deliberately constructed later as a marketing technique. Jazz musicians were already embedded in a capitalist system when they created their music. Or at the very least, jazz was consumed by its audience as a product of the capitalist system.
I'm not sure what the argument is. If I ever hear Adorno's music, it will likely be in the form of a product of the capitalist system (just as most of my acquaintance with Webern comes from this awesome set). I don't see how anything with entertainment value escapes being a commodity in Adorno's view, and I don't get how someone with Jewish heritage who fled Nazi Germany could be so apparently unsympathetic to the counter-cultural value of African-American music. It's hard not to come to the conclusion that Adorno is an uptight scold who has no rhythm. Also, what w-lfs-n said in 61.
Also also, Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven bridge late feudalism and the early culture industry.
My argument is not that Adorno is right, but that for us it is unthinkable that Adorno could be right, because we are too implicated in the system by our loyalty to the particular objects of affection that pop culture already created for us. It is unthinkable for me, for example, that Star Wars functions to perpetuate a system of dominance because I saw it when I was 11.
Adorno encountered jazz in its European roaring-twenties form, so for him it was presumably associated with mindless cafe society hedonism and decadence. But a lot of equally-serious but better people than him (e.g. Bartok) were less close-minded.
Adorno's total identification with the German haute bourgeoisie culture particularly annoys me, especially when he put a left political spin on it. After 1932 or at least 1945 you'd think that it would have dawned on him that perhaps German culture might not be a model for the rest of the world after all.
I guess I object to the commodification analysis too. Even though he was musically very literate, Adorno seemed to use music mostly as a source of tokens for the world-historical argument he was making. I doubt that he bothered to listen to Le Hot Five or anything.