- Classical Music - Failure To Graduate British Prime Minister Tony Blair's recent admission that he doesn't really appreciate classical music is telling, writes Norman Lebrecht. "The problem is one of late adolescence. Most of us rebel at puberty against parental values, only to adopt most of them willy-nilly when we raise children. It used to be one of the more copper-bottomed truths of the music industry that kids who bought rock and pop in their teens and twenties switched to classics around their mid-thirties. The Blair generation is the first to buck that trend, clinging to decrepit rock idols like Jagger, Dylan and Eric Clapton, and embarrassing their offspring by listening to the White Stripes instead of making a mature transition to more intricate music." London Evening Standard 04/30/03
- Why Has Music Dropped Off The Intellectuals' Map? Why are people who pride themselves on being educated and up on the latest books, movies, and even art, so uninterested and uneducated in serious music? "There is a startling ignorance about music among contemporary intellectuals who value the latest literary and philosophical thinking. It was not always like this. Gradually music has become more and more marginal to intellectual endeavour, and this separation may be traced to the first half of the 20th century. Until this time, writers and thinkers saw reflection on music as a culturally central consideration, a view that can be traced right back through the works of Pythagoras, Plato, Socrates, St Augustine, Galileo, Newton, Goethe and Nietzsche..." The Guardian (UK) 04/26/03
- Destruction Of Culture - Holding American Leadership Accountable "There is much we don't know about what happened this month at the Baghdad museum, at its National Library and archives, at the Mosul museum and the rest of that country's gutted cultural institutions. Is it merely the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years, as Paul Zimansky, a Boston University archaeologist, put it? Or should we listen to Eleanor Robson, of All Souls College, Oxford, who said, 'You'd have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale'? Nor do we know who did it. Was this a final act of national rape by Saddam loyalists? Was it what Philippe de Montebello, of the Metropolitan Museum, calls the 'pure Hollywood' scenario — a clever scheme commissioned in advance by shadowy international art thieves? Was it simple opportunism by an unhinged mob? Or some combination thereof? Whatever the answers to those questions, none of them can mitigate the pieces of the damning jigsaw puzzle that have emerged with absolute certainty. The Pentagon was repeatedly warned of the possibility of this catastrophe in advance of the war, and some of its officials were on the case. But at the highest levels at the White House, the Pentagon and central command — where the real clout is — no one cared." The New York Times 04/27/03
- Are You A "Choice Machine" Or Are You A "Situation-Action Machine"? Situation-action machines are built with a bunch of rules that say, "If in situation X, do A," "If in situation B, do Z," and so forth. It's as if you had a list that you kept in your wallet and when important decisions came up, you looked at the list. If the conditions for a particular decision were met, you just did it. You don't know why. It's just that the rule says to do it. A choice machine is different. A choice machine looks at the world and sees options, and it says, "If I did this, what would happen? If I did that, what would happen? If I did this other thing, what would happen?" It builds up an anticipation of what the likely outcome of one action or another would be, and then chooses on the basis of how much that outcome is valued or disvalued." Reason 05/03
- So You're Getting Published....Greaaaat So you got that book of yours published. Great. And against all the odds. You're so lucky. Lucky, lucky, lucky. But by the time your words finally get made into a book, you're feeling compromised and abused and... Poets & Writers 05/03
