"The distinction of art is that it is neither simply an expression of pain... nor an impression of pain, but is itself a force which creates pain."

-- Maya Deren

 “Youth instinctively understand the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.” 

- Marshall McLuhan 

 “Originality is unmusical. The urge to do music is an admiring emulation of music one loves; the urge toward originality happens under threat that the music that sounds good to you somehow isn’t good enough”

- Scott Miller

via this LARB piece by Ivan Kreilkamp on the music writing of the musician who led and fronted Game Theory and The Loud Family, as gathered in the out-of-print book Music: What Happened?

 

Joan Bakewell, the Thinkige Man's crumpet or so they said when they didn't realise that was offensive

 "Popular culture is a contradiction in terms. If it's popular, it's not culture."  

Vivienne Westwood

 

Dancing Friedrich Special

Without music, life would be a mistake.

― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, Or, How to Philosophize With the Hammer

- He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.”

- I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his ‘divine service.’”

- And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche

 

Those seen dancing were thought insane by those that could not hear the music.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

I should only believe in a God that would know how to dance.

And when I saw my devil, I found him serious, thorough, profound, solemn: he was the spirit of gravity—through him all things fall.

Not by wrath, but by laughter, do we slay. Come, let us slay the spirit of gravity!

I learned to walk; since then have I let myself run. I learned to fly; since then I do not need pushing in order to move from a spot.

Now am I light, now do I fly; now do I see myself under myself. Now there danceth a God in me—

Thus spake Zarathustra.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

Also translated as "now a God dances through me"...