successor to Thinkige Kru whose feed doesn't seem to be working properly for reasons unknown - the old blog + archive remains here https://thinkigekru.blogspot.com/ -^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^vintage thoughts from others, vintage thoughts from me - varying degrees of profundity - thoughts quoted for the turn of thought / phrase rather than for truth value - quoted not necessarily because i agree with them or approve of them - i don't necessarily agree with my own past thinkiges!
Wednesday, August 6, 2025
"The call repeats itself into the infinite and liberates the mind of all reasonable inhibitions.... as in drug addiction, a thousand years of civilization fall away in a moment.... Rock & roll is a sign of depersonalisation of the individual, of ecstatic veneration of mental decline and passivity”
- Dr Joost A.M. Meerlo, New York Times, 1957
Tuesday, July 29, 2025
"What's interesting about rock 'n' roll is that its truly radical aspect occurs at the level of sound. ‘Tutti Frutti’ is far more revolutionary than Lennon's 'Woman Is the Nigger of the World,' and the sound of Dylan's voice changed more people's ideas about the world than his political message did."
- Robert Ray
"My argument has always been that the way rock works, both in terms of its emotional effectiveness but also in terms of its politics, is at the level of sound. No matter how powerful you think “Ohio” is, in terms of politics “Tutti Frutti” is more politically profound."
- Robert Ray
Having trouble correlating these righteous remarks with the barely-there quality of the sound of Ray's band The Vulgar Boatmen - The Feelies clarified to a consomme that barely touches the sides as it goes down.
Thinking more generally about this vague area of music - college rock (Ray is an actual college professor) and Amerindie.... Hoboken as haven on Earth.... The Feelies, Camper Van Beethoven, Miracle Legion, Yo La Tengo.... a sensibility big in the Eighties, as a reaction-formation against mainstream rock, but one that endures as a strain to this day
Is it that America is still a Puritan nation at heart?
How else to explain this musical preference for frugality of means and modesty of mode? The Quakerish premium on egalitarianism - the person onstage has no more of a voice than you do. A dislike of drama that taps into the deep Puritan tradition of anti-theatricality.
This taste formation doesn't go in for 'thickness'... it recoils from texturitis.... Performers can never be too self-effacing.
Which is why Scrawl, say, got a better critical reception than Throwing Muses
Why the Mekons were always more of a cause here than Morrissey & Marr
Sunday, July 27, 2025
"What one really learns from an Academy or College is not so much from one's official teachers as from one's fellow-students"
- Vaughan Williams
(talking about his friendship with Gustav Holst)
Tuesday, July 22, 2025
“Resisting madness is the maddest way of being mad.”
― Norman O. Brown
“The insane do not share the normal prejudice in favor of
external reality.”
― Norman O. Brown
“I've been impressed by the extent to which one gets
sentenced by one's own sentences. One explores certain things in play and then
in a strange way they become commitments which one has to live. I have gained a
deep respect for the demonic power of the word. Words are not idle. They have
consequences.”
― Norman O. Brown
“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment [Verhexung]
of our intelligence by means of language.”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical
Meaning of History
“Elektra is not the tool of anyone's revolution. We feel that the revolution will be won by poetics and not by politics - that poetics will change the structure of the world."
- Jac Holzman of Elektra Records, in Rolling Stone 1969
"The act of being in a band and strapping on an electric guitar is a political action"
Wordsworth, from the Prelude to the Lyrical Ballads, written and published in 1800
The Seventeenth Century is barely over and here is William, complaining about what we would think of as the doomscroll or media overload: "the great national events which are daily taking place... a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies", stirred up in the hearts and nervous systems of those who live in cities.
"Hourly gratifies" - how often did broadsheets come out in those days? Perhaps he's talking about gossip, rumors...
And then William's other complaints about degraded entertainments and hyperstimulation - "frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse". He could be talking about TikTok and Reels, influencers and Love Island, videogames and franchise blockbusters.
In the Prelude, he proposes Nature and pastoral life as the remedy, a soul-recentering restoration, a resetting of the overclocked sensibility. Again, very much like wellness and meditation and silent retreats today
"An almost savage torpor" - I'd put that on a T-shirt. That is my existence, distilled.
Interesting also to learn from the Prelude that Wordsworth - whose poetry today seems like proper fancy stuff - was in fact aiming to write in the language of the common man, plainspoken, earnest, stripped of all affectations, circumlocution, ornamentation and other flashy flourishes