h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"Ah yes. There must've been others that have disappeared."

Skin does tend to rot, you know.

If I'm reading you right you think music is becoming ghettoised because people like to listen to things that they can somehow identify with? How is that actually any different from any other point in history?

Huh? I don't know where you got the idea that I was saying that - I guess you *weren't* reading me right.

Edward

The Wiki piece on the valiha suddenly reminded me that at about 8 or 9 we had a unstringed banjo lying about the place ... I unwound some steel cable to improvise strings of various thicknesses and played away some kind of sound with no knowledge of tuning etc. Did not last long?

Cass

Well well! Most children have tom make do with shoeboxes and rubber bands.

KB, I was talking to Cass... he's the only one who's talked about the ghettoisation of music and I forgot to put his name in the post.

Mr Dreadful

Perhaps just as well .. I have just lost a long answer to your question.. Short answer- that is the kind of "divide and rule" history that was inherited from the Nineteenth Century and which the post-war establishment embraced in order to be able to more easily manage a segregated world .Apartheid has its attractions and short term advantages. What the Sixties Generation knew was the old lesson that we all all one Creation and one living entity all interdepedent.

I quoted from the start of my book "Modern Lessons From Medieval Hisory" (on My Space) which quoted a US History Prof in 1963 stating that the struggle of people for their simple rights as human beings was a theme that ran right through history.

Well it did run through the History that underpinned "The Establishment" and justified their power over individuals and communities by the way that (for a cost) they collectively would deliver those rights- the cost being a tax levy of about 40% of all GDP- in good times, more when there is debt to be serviced.

Cass

"What the Sixties Generation knew was the old lesson that we all all one Creation and one living entity all interdepedent."

Except we're not though. We're all individuals and should be able, nay encouraged, to express that as broadly or as narrowly as we see fit... I 'wasn't there', physically or otherwise but I thought the lesson of the Sixties Generation was that individual freedom without hurting others is the greatest thing to aspire to.

It is ironic, of course, that the Sixties Generation are the people who made the world the way it is now.

Mr Dreadful

The obvious thing about Sixties was "collectivism" and the right of a generation acting together to overthrow the confines of the establishment managed reality. Hence my wife and I meeting properly in the summer of 1965 felt that we might be able to marry England and France.

This collectivism was most obvious for this thread in the way that the Beatles and other groups threw-over the star mentality of vaudeville that allowed space for the first Rock and Rollers. Bill Haley and the Comets, Little Richard and ??? (Jimi Hendrix was one of various anonymous backing musicians), and the great Chuck Berry famously toured for decades just jetting into places and assuming that the local backing band knew enough to follow him. Buddy Holly and the Crickets. Elvis Presley.

Perhaps the British groups taught the US a thing or two about the sum being greater than the total of its parts. The Beatles in their uniform emphasised the collective and even The Rolling Stones with a very obvious Star-front man accepted that model.. American Groups caught on.

Moreover it was not a generation that believed in the right of individuals to just have a good time, though there were some people who just saw it that way.

As I have explained we were brought up with the expectation that we would somehow be the making of a New and Better world, and certainly the one that we were born into was not worth being born into if it was not capable of renaissance and renewal. That is why we espoused world causes like Peace, Civil Rights and the anti-Apartheid movement. Perhaps not everyone sensed the same feeling of international brotherhood, but for me and those people that I knew this was very much the mood of the times. Dylan caught the mood of the age brilliantly with "Blowin in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a Changin".

And if we had any confusion about the desolation of just having your own life to run, all we had to do was consider the situation of so many of our mother's. Lots of them finally offered the Victorian Dream of womenhood shut away from daily life with husbands off earning money, children off getting educated, or cared for and looked after by the Welfare State, with the endless rigour of "domestic work" removed by "white goods", new technology and cheap-mass-produced things that undermined old skills like sewing and knitting and therefore the value of the people who had them.

In his introduction to the UK in 1972 the French writer Jean Bailhache (among much other perceptive stuff) detailed the annual consumption of painkillers, anti-depressants and sleeping pills which was prevalent in middle-aged women of that generation.

So things like Woodstock reflected a deeply felt belief, that through music, art, dance, we could transcend barriers and boundaries and make this world a better place.. That is not a job for people who just want to "do their own thing."

In a book about the Beatles there is a scathing comment from John Lennon about all the acts who were turning up to be auditioned by Apple. For- true to his convictions- he was spending hours trying to give other people a chance.

"I tried when we were in Wigmore Street to see everyone like we said, everyone day in and day out, and there wasn't anyone who had anything to offer to society or me or anything . There was just, 'I want, I want. and why not?' and terrible scenes like that going on in the offices with different spades and hippies and all different people very wild to me. Even on the peace campaign we had a lot of that too. Once you open the door it's hard you know"..

But by the late Sixties these new applicants were not teenagers and young people like us who had been forged in the heat of war. They had been brought up in "They've Never Had it so Good" Britain that they expected to just get better and provide them with even more and better in the Future. They wanted to be rich and famous , and sometimes sadly and tragically got their way.

I will not stretch your cynicism with my encounter with the Carpenters.

The other night I caught the fag-end of a documentary about a British neurosurgeon who has used his free-time for the last 15 years or so to go to operate in the Ukraine. He said that he had come to love the Ukraine and its people almost as much as he loved England, and he consoled himself with the knowledge that he could carry to the grave of the lives that he had enhanced that would live on thanks to him, because without his gift of his services these people they would never get treated. What else is life for, he mused at the end, than using it to improve the life of others?


Dylan on being an individual " I want you to surround me so I can know that I am really real".

But the spirit lives on. Perhaps it is appropriate to celebrate the news our daughter gave us that a friend (and ex-boyfriend) is soon to be a father. For the last several years he has worked for OXFAM in the Chad region, and he met his US partner out there doing similar work.

Cass

So teamwork = collectivism = teamwork? I disagree, surely teamwork is perfectly possible, and perfectly rewarding without having to be 100% philosophically collectivist?

I might be misunderstanding you... I get on better with arguments that are concise and to the point than I do with walls of text expressing something that can probably be expressed with far fewer words. Your posts are full of irrelevant details and tangental observations and I still don't know what you mean by the ghettoisation of music!

The mentions of 'teamwork' can easily be changed to 'helping others' of course...

True colletivisim is, to me, just as selfish as complete individualism. Both show a remarkable disregard for other people's feelings and desires.

Mr Dreadful

That was the whole point of the collectivism of the Sixties. On the whole it felt life-enhancing and liberating for most people.. But if you were not around you have only really known the vaguely managed reality in which people have been forced to fit in to the establishment top-down and managed reality- as in the totalitarian states of the USSR, Nazi Germany and Japan that taught the leaders of "The Western Allies" just how the world should be run after 1945 in order to reap the harvest of science and technology just expanding the modern reality in which people were made to "feel myself a wheel in something turning".. This was not collectivism but mechanism.

But science and technology has moved on and here we are trying to achieve some virtual human contact via all of this technology that fits us to its needs.

Cass

PS. Teamwork is perhaps even more accepting others help and input as the reverse. You can help others and make them feel valueless. Much better to make them feel that they have something to offer. George Harrison was actively encouraged by Lennon-Macartney to write material that might be Beatles material.

Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater:

Cream - Mother's Lament
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwEPCd0wtEI

"George Harrison was actively encouraged by Lennon-Macartney to write material that might be Beatles material."

Shame they let Ringo write as well...

Mr. D:

I'm not sure in what sense you're using 'collectivism' or what you understand by it. But some words I like on roughly that topic are:

'The free development of each becomes the condition for the free development of all.'

The teamwork is voluntary - but you'll probably score more goals with ten other folk to back you up.

End with a song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhysAD6yXFE&feature=fvst

I was using it in the context I was getting from Cass: that we're all interlinked and interdependant and we's all be better off working together all the time regardless of individual feelings and what wanting to just be yourself and do your own thing sometimes is bad m'kay and entirely a product of the modern world.

As I said, I might have misunderstood him, but I found the wall of words somewhat impenetrable.

Collectivism = "Come Together" etc... Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock"


Flower Power. Part of my repertoire since 1965 has been a gradually evolving setting of a song from the Tristan and Iseult epic written down in fragments in the twelfh century. It tells of how the flowers of a white and a red rose tree lived apart, until a young gallant plucked one of each to present to his "fair lady". Petulantly she threw the flowers into the stream. But, though the flowers as such were destroyed by their passage down the stream to the sea, during that transition the white and red petals had mingled and merged.

"Rose of the white thorn
Rose of the red
How shall their union be?
By tiding-mouth bar
By sand-dune set star
They shall pass,shall be lost in the sea".


As I have said/inferred there was a real sense of brotherhood amongst all trying to make music and songs to express the feelings and thoughts of that global generation. Very little selfish ego but a willingness to share and show.

And to support. The George Harrison's Bangladesh Concert really unlocked the media possibilities of "Rock" at least as a way to raise money and achieve "Bandaid" "sticking plaster-ways of tackling chronic humanitarian disasters that were possible with money. Though I always think that it was the spectre, not of "The Age of Catastrophe", but of other famines that resonated through Rock-people with Irish roots like Bob Geldorf and Bono and made them feel "never again".

And on that theme, and that of Santana and mature playing, for some reason Carlos Santana's 1987 "Blues For Salvador" has a very special place in my affections.

Cass

>>As I said, I might have misunderstood him, but I found the wall of words somewhat impenetrable.



End with a song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JECTUQVrvzE

Interesting. I'm not hugely familiar with the Tristan and Iseult story but I've never heard of any roses in it apart from the one what grew from her grave.

Red and white roses put me more in mind of Lancaster and York... flower power with extreme prejudice, if you will!

The problem with fond, rose-tinted views of flower power (pun very much intended) is the same as taking similar views of any counter-culture movement that happened to catch on in a big way: it was very much a reflection of it's time rather than a reflection of what's best for humanity as a whole. The human race functioned best as individual tribes that were far away enough from each other that war wasn't a constant threat; small groups and families working together in themselves but not together as a whole. Even by the 60s we were too thickly spread to truly 'give peace a chance'.

>> Your posts are full of irrelevant details and
tangental observations <<

And I thank god for that.
So few modern writers, especially the younger ones,
have the kind of 360 degree frames of reference with
which Cass constantly delights me. To a truly open mind
context is in a constant state of flux and expansion.

Trying to narrow the focus only restricts the mind and
limits the potential of lurking possibilities.

~jwf~