An interesting article, thanks amclark. On one level it reinforces my view that I, and I am sure many others, are actually downloading too much music to be able to fully appreciate it. But conversely, having free or cheap downloadable music has enabled me to be introduced to far more artists and even genre than I would if I had to go out and pay, as I did this morning, £13 for a one hour long CD - that would give me 65 tracks on emusic. Yes, certainly food for thought.
Charming, absurd, and lugubrious. At times, Kurkov reminds me of a less longwinded and more whimsical Murakami. If anything it is a nice lift after Oryx and Crake.
@amclark2, that's an interesting article (though I found the last paragraph weak after the genuine issues he had thrown up earlier in the piece). Some of what he is saying applies also the the curation of a personal music collection. I've deleted at least as many albums as I've downloaded in the past month; given the finitude of time, every so-so album sitting my collection is potentially time not spent listening to something that I have deemed more likely to reward my attentiveness. I think I am starting to recover a little from "oh, it's free, I'd better download it then". Same with bought things - that's an additional reason (beyond the chaos over there) why my SFL is at an all time low. None of which means I'm not still looking for new stuff, but an uncurated collection is in the end a heap.
Fascinating, GP. The portion of Retromania I read last night was about the growth of the use of "curate" to refer to things associated with music e.g. concerts, compilations, etc. If memory serves, it wasn't until Sonic Youth started using it in the 80s for various things they did, that the word came out of the museum/antiquities zone to be applied to music. Now it's ubiquitous.
Reynolds uses that to help support his argument regarding fascination with the past. He argues that when we use a word formerly used only for Greek sculpture or Renaissance painting, etc. for early 80s minimal synth pop or West African psych, we are demonstrating the power of the near past over the present. He puts it better of course.
As for the Kirby article, my hope is that as those of us who remember the music world before the internet get replaced by those who have been plugged in since birth, these questions will find a natural answer. I base this hope on my view that as flummoxed as I get by information overload when visiting a new site, the younger generation seems completely at ease.
@Craig, well on the one hand my use of the term was a direct result of the trend you/he note(s). If I recall correctly the term struck me as one to use in relation to my music collection when I read an article somewhere (not on the emu site) by an emu employee arguing for why there is still going to be a market for buying MP3s even with the advent of spotify. She (I think it was a she, I didn't save the link) not only said that there is a sector of people who want to own their music, not just stream it (I'm in that category) but also that there are folk for whom their music collection is a carefully "curated" collection, which is not the same thing as the 13 million track "library" that you get with Spotify or whomever.
That lodged with me as not only in some measure true for me, but also as something I'd maybe like to be even more true than it has been of late. I see little satisfaction in having a hard drive that is a smaller randomized subset of the Spotify pile, so unless there is some active collecting/curating going on, then spotify does become the answer: why not just go with the bigger pile. On the other hand if part of the satisfaction is in managing/tracking/organizing/rating etc - and "curating" is as good a word for any as this, then owning remains more important. (I am aware these are not the only considerations in play pro or contra spotify, and I do have a use for spotify, I'm just picking out this factor among others). And a curated collection is defined as much by what is removed as by what is retained; otherwise it's a warehouse.
So, anyway, that use of the term jumped out at me and stuck, less because of any conscious retromania than because of the structural point that when you have a large collection of things you have a choice to organize them or not; and when those things are art objects "curate" has a nice ennobling ring to it. I'm a little wary (this is the "on the other hand") of arguments from etymological shifts - words get extended to new domains through fuzzy logic all the time, and that does not necessarily mean that any given feature of their past use is being carried forward, only that some point of fuzzy similarity was sensed. George Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things is a useful read tangential to this.
Fascinating discussion. Using this use of the terminology, my itunes is my warehouse, whilst what is on my 30GB ipod is curated, in that it is organised and what is there is what I want in my mainstream collection. I am beginning to be more selective and, for example, I am trying to fill gaps in my collection - I bought a boxed Miles Davis set a few days ago to fill some gaps. It is interesting that now I have 100 tracks to download per month from emusic, compared with 250 per month for the previous six months, and 200 for the six months before that, I have had to become more selective and think more about my collection and what I want in it.
To me curating at least in the museum sense ( i hope to read retromania later this year sometime) suggests thoughtful and purposeful collecting which should mean choosing not to acquire certain objects. It could also signal a reluctance to get rid of any media, just in case some day you might want to go back to it.
I've deleted some albums and artists I just don't listen to (or gotten rid of the psychical album) and have been trying to weed out unread books that I doubt I will ever get to anytime soon. I guess that's why I think of the rejecting aspect of curate.
That's interesting choiceweb0pen0. I have no problem getting rid of books I've never read, or haven't read for a number of years, but I cannot get rid of music, even stuff I have downloaded free and really do not like. Must be something psychological there!
Though I've never used the word "curating" myself, that's exactly what I do. There is some vaguely defined goal of an "ideal" collection of classical music that I appear to be working towards - loosely, "all the important stuff and a representative sample of everything else". Just last night, for instance, I started examining composers who have a significant birth or death anniversary this year, and I ask myself, what major works of Debussy (born 150 years ago) do I still not have, or how should I tackle a composer I don't know much of - John Cage (born 100 years ago), or is there a good recording out there with music by Hans Leo Hassler (died 400 years ago). This would be pretty much impossible without my cheap emusic subs - which also give me the chance to spend a little to get stuff I "should" hear even if I'm not sure I'm going to like it.
@greg, I have to catch myself in the right mood. There are times when I also find it hard to delete anything (arguments in head: but it costs nothing to leave it there; you might want to listen to it one day; your tastes keep changing and this might be what you want next year; bigger collection is better; it's nice to rediscover things you'd forgotten about and hear them again). There are times when I am feeling more ruthless (arguments in head: I just rediscovered this and it really was not very good, I could have been listening to something I liked more, if I leave it there I'll feel obliged to give it another hour of my life some day, the bigger the collection gets the more I feel overwhelmed by it and have to devise arcane strategies for rotating playlists, I have enough things that I really like to keep me going forever so why keep this). I just had a ruthless few weeks, kind of like the spring cleaning bug, but I can feel it waning. It's like when you start cleaning out the garage and in the first hour throw away a ton of junk but by the third hour are finding reasons to keep anything else you find. As if the sub-brain will only let me discard so many assets at a time. Another thing prompting me is that getting better speakers is pushing me back to buying CDs for key releases - I really can hear the difference; and that re-raises issues of finite storage.
Yes, I have thought through the arguements both ways, but I have come to the conclusion everytime that music is only taking up virtual space, so I should keep it. My mother inherited from her father, a farmer, keep everything you may need it one day, and I think I have inherited aspects of that. I've got better in some aspects of my life - clothes, books etc, but it received a knock a few weeks ago when I was looking for a book I must have got rid of a year or so ago. But with music I keep everything. I did get rid of 70% of my LPs a couple of years ago - things I'd now got either on CD or digitally. But I have an enormous number of CDs. Some I play regularly, as my daily pattern is to put on a CD before getting to the computer (hence the limited range of 'morning' music as it depends upon what CDs are around) Most are stored in a bedroom cupboard. I keep intending loading more on to itunes in both loseless format and 256kps format, as much of the early stuff I loaded onto my computer was via Windows Media Player at 128Kps.Then in theory, as long as I keep a back-up I could reduce my CDs, but that will take time and willl need to bcome a priority.
So far so good, Greg. The initial 20% of the novel feels markedly different from the other two Murakami novels I've read (Dance Dance Dance and 1Q84) whereby the protagonist is not the one mired in overt self-absorbed melancholia per se but happy to see that the obsession with ears is still there.
Proust Was A Neuroscientist is a opening nicely as well; reading about Whitman so I dug out a copy of Leaves Of Grass to read alongside this chapter and the experience of juggling all these works is leaving me feeling invigorated. :-)
I cull in small doses. I've moving soon after I get married into a 2 bedroom apartment, so need to shrink down my possession. I've found in the past when it gets close to packing up everything I have a tendency to not want to get rid of anything.
Spent the morning reading Buchmendel by Stefan Zweig. Actually a fascinating story to think about in relation to music consumption - about a person whose reading habits and personality have been formed in a cultural milieu other and older than the one he now inhabits, and the dislocation that results.
Finished up Norwegian Wood and loved every page of it, the year of Toru's life and he's reaction to it was a close mirror to mine when hitting my 20th birthday, though, as an individual he kept his shit together much better than I had. Also interesting to note, no bizarre dream sequences to speak of and the novel is much more straightforward than the others I've read. However, dissociative females are out in spades between the pages of the book which leads me to believe Murakami has mommy issues.
I read Norwegian Wood and Wind-Up Bird just before Christmas. NW is a "straight" novel, if that is the right way to put it, rather than the sort of fantasy he is known for. Having read Wind-Up Bird and 1Q84 within a month or two of each other, it is easy to see the overlapping themes (mommy issues).
I didn't know that many artists on the list either. I mostly went for Josh Ritter who had a novel, Bright's Passage, published early this year that's not bad.
Comments
Charming, absurd, and lugubrious. At times, Kurkov reminds me of a less longwinded and more whimsical Murakami. If anything it is a nice lift after Oryx and Crake.
Reynolds uses that to help support his argument regarding fascination with the past. He argues that when we use a word formerly used only for Greek sculpture or Renaissance painting, etc. for early 80s minimal synth pop or West African psych, we are demonstrating the power of the near past over the present. He puts it better of course.
As for the Kirby article, my hope is that as those of us who remember the music world before the internet get replaced by those who have been plugged in since birth, these questions will find a natural answer. I base this hope on my view that as flummoxed as I get by information overload when visiting a new site, the younger generation seems completely at ease.
Craig
That lodged with me as not only in some measure true for me, but also as something I'd maybe like to be even more true than it has been of late. I see little satisfaction in having a hard drive that is a smaller randomized subset of the Spotify pile, so unless there is some active collecting/curating going on, then spotify does become the answer: why not just go with the bigger pile. On the other hand if part of the satisfaction is in managing/tracking/organizing/rating etc - and "curating" is as good a word for any as this, then owning remains more important. (I am aware these are not the only considerations in play pro or contra spotify, and I do have a use for spotify, I'm just picking out this factor among others). And a curated collection is defined as much by what is removed as by what is retained; otherwise it's a warehouse.
So, anyway, that use of the term jumped out at me and stuck, less because of any conscious retromania than because of the structural point that when you have a large collection of things you have a choice to organize them or not; and when those things are art objects "curate" has a nice ennobling ring to it. I'm a little wary (this is the "on the other hand") of arguments from etymological shifts - words get extended to new domains through fuzzy logic all the time, and that does not necessarily mean that any given feature of their past use is being carried forward, only that some point of fuzzy similarity was sensed. George Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things is a useful read tangential to this.
I've deleted some albums and artists I just don't listen to (or gotten rid of the psychical album) and have been trying to weed out unread books that I doubt I will ever get to anytime soon. I guess that's why I think of the rejecting aspect of curate.
Proust Was A Neuroscientist is a opening nicely as well; reading about Whitman so I dug out a copy of Leaves Of Grass to read alongside this chapter and the experience of juggling all these works is leaving me feeling invigorated. :-)
http://www.fast-and-wide.com/wideangle/2697-the-sound-of-sport-what-is-real?
So far it's excellent...I think...I really have no idea what is actually going on.
Craig
"...I really have no idea what is actually going on." Yeah, get used to that warm sense of confusion, that space-cadet glow. I love this book, btw.
Craig
I'm still reading Retromania, but in ten days or so we're off to Edinburgh for a few days, so I thought it was time I did some background reading
Craig