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 20, 2025
Tuesday, August 12, 2025
"My favorite viewing, and this is the first time I have ever admitted it to anyone, but what I love to do, when I don’t watch evangelicals, when I can’t read or write and can’t go out walking, and don’t want to just tear my hair and destroy myself, I put on, here in New Haven, cable channel thirteen and I watch rock television endlessly.
"As a sheer revelation of the American religion it’s overwhelming. Yes, I like to watch the dancing girls too. The sex part of it is fine. Occasionally it’s musically interesting, but you know, ninety-nine out of a hundred groups are just bilge. And there hasn’t been any good American rock since, alas, The Band disbanded.
"I watch MTV endlessly, my dear, because what is going on there, not just in the lyrics but in its whole ambience, is the real vision of what the country needs and desires. It’s the image of reality that it sees, and it’s quite weird and wonderful. It confirms exactly these two points: first, that no matter how many are on the screen at once, not one of them feels free except in total self-exaltation. And second, it comes through again and again in the lyrics and the way one dances, the way one moves, that what is best and purest in one is just no part of the creation—that myth of an essential purity before and beyond experience never goes away. It’s quite fascinating"
Harold Bloom, 1991
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

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Someone recentl y asked Greil Marcus why "sixties and seventies rock crits hate prog so much?" "Why do people hate prog roc...
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love to listen to this stuff but I'm not sure I really understand it beyond "that's a bunch of cool weird noises in a pattern...