Outis Niemand

About Outis Niemand

http://asundayofliberty.com

Ornamental hermit. Sciolist. Musician manqué. Poetaster. Armchair psychologist. Pseudo-philosopher. Founder of Panta Rheism™. The complete Rabelaisian man. Great eater, deep drinker, stout fighter, prodigious lover; clear thinker, creator of beauty, seeker of truth and prophet of heroic grandeurs. I coalesce the vapors of human experience into a viable and logical comprehension. (Contact: asundayofliberty at gmail)

Posts by Outis Niemand:

Then I Went Down Into the Basement Where My Friend, the Maniac, Busies Himself with His Electronic Graffiti

By in foolosophy, writing

J.E.H. Smith:

But here is the thought that makes death formidable again: it is the moment after which I will never post to my blog again, after which I will never write another Facebook status update, I will never again tweet. My soul cries out: “But I can’t live without doing these things!” And death answers back: “No. But you can die.”
This is to say that my life is wrapped up with an activity from which I will have to leave off at death. But it is also the activity, I am increasingly coming to think, of actively constructing my self, and this activity, when it leaves off in death, will leave an accurate and vivid trace of a life. My online activity is, as I already put it, both mask and gravestone at once.
This may not be an entirely different experience than the one Robert Burton had when he brought out the fourth and fifth and sixth editions of The Anatomy of Melancholy. But the immediacy of blogging, and its lack of finality, make it much more like life itself than a book ever could be, with the backlogged publishers who promise it and the slow-churning presses that produce it. There is no publisher to blame if my blog is not sufficiently far along in its perfection at the moment of my death, no editorial wrangling or grinding production process. There is only me, and what I hope might be a mirror of me, diffused then through the Web of my culture by means I don’t understand: a mirror of me mirroring the world by sitting in a chair and looking at a screen and, every now and again, out the window.
Blogging as self-creation rather than the more typical sense of self-expression; that’s a pretty cool way to think about it. I’ve said before that I feel much more complete as a person since I started systematically writing my thoughts down like this. My brain feels more alive, my ideas feel more substantial. At times when kismet arranges for an abundance of stress and work to align with a paucity of time and inspiration for writing, as was the case earlier this week, I can feel seriously low and empty (as the angelic Shanna, who graciously takes on the thankless task of trying to cheer me up, can attest). This has done more to shape and sculpt different aspects of my personality than anything I’ve done in my adult life, I think. It’s what mainly provides a sense of dynamism and prevents me from feeling stagnant. I wonder what kind of person I’d be if I had started doing this as a teenager?
My mom was trying to give me helpful advice about fleshing out my résumé the other day, telling me to add in anything extracurricular that might be interesting. “What about writing? Do you do any? You know, so-and-so always said you had real talent…”
No, I said, I don’t do any writing. There’s only a few people who know that about me, and I have incriminating photos of all of them to ensure their silence. This is one of the absolute most important activities in my life, and I prefer to keep it a secret and do it just for fun. Maybe that’s what defines me as a hermit more than anything.

For We are Never Finished with Our Not Dying

By in books, technology

That’s a line from a Rilke poem. Maybe he was prophetically referring to the book:

It is perhaps a symptom of print’s decline that the current conversation about the book’s demise has forgotten all these other ones. Instead we shuttle between two equally hollow poles: goofball digital boosterism a la Negroponte on one side and on the other a helpless, anguished nostalgia for the good old days of papercuts. Call it bibilionecrophilia: the retreat of the print-faithful into a sort of autistic fetishization of the book-as-object—as if Jeff Bezos could be convinced to lay e-profits aside by recalling for a moment the soft, woody aroma of a yellow-paged Grove Press paperback; as if there were nothing more to books than paper, ink, and glue.
For the record, my own loyalties are uncomplicated. I adore few humans more than I love books. I make no promises, but I do not expect to purchase a Kindle or a Nook or any of their offspring. I hope to keep bringing home bound paper books until my shelves snap from their weight, until there is no room in my apartment for a bed or a couch or another human being, until the floorboards collapse and my eyes blur to dim. But the book, bless it, is not a simple thing.
The essay, which is actually pretty interesting, is called, yes, “The Death of the Book.” (I wonder if it’s too late to trademark that phrase and make a mint.) I’m eagerly awaiting the essay proclaiming the death of grandiloquent proclamations of the death of this or that object or tradition. Ooh, meta.

The Yellow Peril

By in environment, omnigatherum

I drove down a rural road this morning, turned around and came back the other way a minute later. Not only was the pollen still swirling through the air in my wake, like a grainy mist or fog, but I could see my tire tracks, as if I had driven through a light dusting of snow.

There are many lovely things to appreciate about spring, but this is not one of them.

It’s Over Now and Not Enough

By in music, the big sleep

According to a notice posted on the band’s official site, TV On The Radio bassist Gerard Smith died this morning, only weeks after it was revealed he had been diagnosed with lung cancer. He was 34.

Damn. I’ve been listening to them a lot in the last couple months, and their new CD has been incessantly playing in my stereo for the last week straight, partially because I find it difficult to get past the first three songs. What a shame.

In Dixie Land I’ll Take My Stand

By in calvin and hobbes, fresh hell, old dixie, the feeling of absurdity

I thought I had seen it all when it came to unconscionable desecration of the image of Calvin (from Calvin & Hobbes). Even though Bill Watterson never made his work available for merchandising, you still see stickers and window decals of Calvin being used to symbolize contempt for various NASCAR drivers via a stream of urine and an evil smirk, or as a religious simpleton kneeling in prayer before a cross. There is no end to the number of treasures these cretins will defile with their filthy hands.

But this, now… I saw a truck yesterday with an image in the back glass of Calvin defiantly holding up a middle finger and a Confederate flag, right next to another stars ‘n’ bars sticker reading “Rebel Pride”. So I did the only thing a reasonable man could have done.
I followed him to his destination and waited for him to park and head into the building, whereupon I walked over, stuffed a rag into his gas tank, lit it on fire, hopped back in the car and drove off. As I looked back in the rearview mirror, mine eyes saw the glory of the orange fireball blossoming over the ridge. Up in flames like Atlanta under General Sherman, I tell you what.
Mess with the greatest comic strip ever written, and my wrath will be merciless, swift and sure.

Pietzsche

By in nietzsche, omnigatherum

It translates into this: I end up playing video games with a bunch of 23-year-olds until 3 a.m., and he ends up reading the Nietzsche I give him.

This is a pretty cool glimpse into Glenn Greenwald’s personal life. I already held him in high esteem for being the closest thing to a mainstream Noam Chomsky we can likely have in our media, but he’s a Nietzsche fan too? Awesome.

Definitely Maybe

By in alan watts, extraordinary popular delusions, religion, spiritual-not-religious, the madness of crowds

Mitch Horowitz:

For all of its inroads into mainstream life, New Age became a term (and sometimes an epithet) that for many serious people connoted nothing more than a softheaded jumble of spiritual-therapeutic remedies or bromides. But the New Age did, in fact, have a core set of beliefs and a definable point of view. Most people, thought schools, or movements identified as New Age from the 1970s through the early twenty-first century shared these traits:
  1. Belief in the therapeutic value of spiritual or religious ideas
  2. Belief in a mind-body connection in health
  3. Belief that human consciousness is evolving to higher stages
  4. Belief that thoughts, in some greater or lesser measure, determine reality
  5. Belief that spiritual understanding is available without allegiance to a specific religion or doctrine
Most twenty-first century Americans, whatever their background, would probably agree with a majority of those statements.
Well, let’s see how I do:
1. Meh. I’m sure a lot of spiritual or religious ideas are comforting and reassuring, especially those that reinforce core features of our identity, the ones we don’t like to question. On the other hand, Catholicism, to name the most obvious example. Assuming you’re not forced to spend a lifetime in therapy to recover from being raped by a priest, you’re still going to have all that infamous guilt to work through. And on the other other hand, I see intelligent people put themselves through unnecessary anguish over the state of their soul and the purpose of their life, straining their third eye to try to perceive supposedly hidden clues to the Meaning Of It All behind the presumed façade of empirical reality. And that doesn’t even touch on whether believing in manifestly false ideas can be said to be truly good for you in the long run (assuming, of course, that at least some metaphysical ideas are indeed false), regardless of whether they make you temporarily happy or not. Is ignorance truly bliss, then?
2. Given that the mind is part of the body; more specifically, the brain, then yes, obviously. The problem comes when you’re asked to rigorously define “connection”.
3. No. And what does “higher” mean anyway? Better? In what way? I have a terrible suspicion that a lot of people think there can and should be an ideal world in which nothing “bad” or “negative” ever happens, which betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how necessary those things are in order for there to be anything “good” or “positive”. I don’t need to elaborate here, since Alan Watts wrote many fine books about this concept before I even existed. Check them out.
4. Thoughts can determine how effectively you act upon and react to reality, but there is still something going on out there independent of your ego that you simply do not control with the power of your thoughts, no matter how much of a market there is for books telling you otherwise.
5. First, we would have to agree that there is such a thing as “spiritual understanding”, rather than just metaphysical nonsense, so once again, let’s define our terms. Even if we can’t, though, I can certainly agree that ordinary individuals are perfectly capable of coming up with their own nonsense without having to be instructed in the proper methods by any supposed authorities.

Bounded in a Nutshell, a King of Infinite Space

By in foolosophy, the big sleep

Peter Lawler:

Will indefinite longevity be the secret to human happiness? Well, there’s no denying that people would rather not die at any particular time, and that there’s a lot of misery in being governed by the scarcity of time. Time, we can’t help but notice, ruins or undermines at least most forms of human enjoyment. That’s why, we can say, that human beings have always longed for immortality, to be freed from the miserable constraints of their self-conscious mortality. When thinking about immortality, we can’t help but begin with the Greek gods—who were self-conscious but didn’t die. They were, in other words, in many respects like our vampires.
But the immortality of the Greeks gods was even meant to make sense or be a realistic possibility. The poets invented them—like today’s poets employ the Vampires–to show that immortality isn’t only impossible but undesirable. And so if we thought about who we are, we’d actually chose the mortality with which each of us stuck anyway. Our longing for immortality is best satisfied by accomplishments that stand the test of time—the immortal glory of the great political deeds or of the enduring beauty and wisdom of works of art or literature–although even our fame, we really know, doesn’t last forever. And we can achieve a kind of immortality through our minds, through knowing the eternal truth about natural necessity, through philosophy. Everything great that we do—from having children to writing THE REPUBLIC –depends on being mortal. The polymorphous human eros that animates us, in other words, depends upon death. Only mortals know what it means really to fall in love.
Good stuff, preach it, true dat, but I must beg to differ with one of his lines above — time is the necessary boundary marker that defines most forms of human enjoyment. The passing of time is what gives us the impetus to act at all. Without the need to take advantage of a unique, unrepeatable opportunity to act on a possibility that may never present itself again, why bother to do anything but daydream about limitless potential?
I’ve often thought that my late forties or early fifties would be enough living for me. It’s not so much a statement of desire or intent to be dead within the next ten or fifteen years as it is a way to force myself to live mindfully in the meantime. If you didn’t have a vague expectation of living for another several decades, becoming a doddering, senile husk of a person, what might you do differently now? How much more vivid might so many experiences seem in light of that perspective? I’d rather take the decade-plus of focused, intense awareness than the somnambulant daze that so many people spend their long lives in.

I Got Mine

By in waiting for the barbarians

Bill Moyers: But here’s the problem for journalism. When we write about inequality, we use numbers that are profound but numbing. I mean, here’s something I just read: over the past twenty years, the elite 1 percent of Americans saw their share of the nation’s income double, from 11.3 percent to 22.1 percent, but their tax burden shrank by about one-third. Now, those facts tell us something very important: that the rich got richer as their tax rates shrank. But it doesn’t seem to start people’s blood rushing.
David Simon: You start talking about a social compact between the people at the bottom of the pyramid and the people at the top, and people look at you and say, “Are you talking about sharing wealth?” Listen, capitalism is the only engine credible enough to generate mass wealth. I think it’s imperfect, but we’re stuck with it. And thank God we have that in the toolbox. But if you don’t manage it in some way that incorporates all of society, if everybody’s not benefiting on some level and you don’t have a sense of shared purpose, national purpose, then it’s just a pyramid scheme. Who’s standing on top of whose throat?
Bill Moyers: Why do you think, David, that we tolerate such gaps between rich and poor?
David Simon: You know, I’m fascinated by it. Because a lot of the people who end up voting for that kind of laissez-faire market policy are people who get creamed by it. And I think it’s almost like a casino. You’re looking at the guy winning, you’re looking at the guy who pulled the lever and all the bells go off, all the coins are coming out of a one-armed bandit. You’re thinking, “That could be me. I’ll play by those rules.” But actually, those are house rules. And most of you are going to lose.
I’ve had some form of this conversation three times in the last five days with friends of mine, puzzling over how we got to this point as a nation, where Wall St. and the Pentagon can keep taking, taking, taking as much money as they want, but the blame will fall on teachers, unions and unemployed people. Circling the drain, we are…

Young Love

By in poetry

My stepson and his girlfriend are finally living together after a year and a half of a long-distance romance. I was watching them yesterday attempting to make a pound cake together, obviously enjoying every minute of it despite getting in each other’s way constantly, and later falling asleep on each other while watching TV. It may not do my reputation any favors, but I can admit to feeling a bit verklempt as I looked at them, illuminated in the cathode glow, and thought of another poem by Auden:
Do not turn, do not lift your eyes
Toward the still pair standing
On the bridge between your properties,
Indifferent to your minding:
In its glory, in its power,
This is their hour.
Nothing your strength, your skill could do
Can alter their embrace
Or dispersuade the Furies who
At the appointed place
With claw and dreadful brow
Wait for them now.
Good luck, you two.

Plink, Plink, Plink, Plink

By in music

John Carpenter:

AVC: The movies you scored have a very distinctive sound. How did you end up focusing on the synthesizer as your primary instrument?
JC: From early on, when synthesizers were first introduced into music, I liked the idea that you could get a big sound with them, electronic, but like an orchestra. And I could play it all myself. That was exciting. I was kind of a half-assed musician.
Gluteally-challenged he may be, but I loved the soundtrack to the first couple Halloween movies. Loved it, I tell you. One of the very first things I did when I got Internet access was look to see if I could find the actual CD, and I ended up getting it from some Wiccan bookstore somewhere. Before that, I had made recordings of myself on a shitty keyboard trying to recreate my favorite tracks so that I could listen to them around Halloween. See, I’ve always felt that one of the most glaring deficiencies of my other favorite holiday is that unlike Christmas, there’s no body of music to help ground the experience of Halloween in the memory. No Halloween carols. And no, novelty songs like “Monster Mash” do not count. Don’t even insult the macabre grandeur of that most sinister time of year with such tripe.
Anyway, yes. Every October, I spend a fair amount of time listening to Halloween 1978 (Laurie’s Theme), The Haunted House, and, of course, the famous theme itself on repeat. Just can’t get enough of that simplistic, spooky piano.

Those Who Help Themselves

By in books, foolosophy, philosophy, spiritual-not-religious

De Botton promised his series would be “a ground-breaking experiment”, offering rigorous self-help books that hark back to the days when – in the hands of Epicurus and Seneca – such tomes were highly valued, rather than the much-ridiculed genre of today. “We need self-help books more than ever before,” he said. “In the age of moral and practical confusions, the self-help book is crying out to be redesigned and rehabilitated.”

Well, I’m interested to see what this will be like. I’ve always enjoyed de Botton’s writing, though others disagree:
Is there a sniffy faction within the world of philosophy that takes a dim view of attempts to make the subject more widely accessible?
“Oh, I’m absolutely sure of it. But I also think that attitude has moderated considerably over time. Ten to 15 years ago, when I started to try to do this, I’m pretty sure there was a lot of sniffing going on.” He does a bit of his own sniffing, though, a moment later, when I mention the popularity of bestselling writers whom he has described as quasi-philosophers.
“Hmm, yes, the [Alain] de Bottons and so on,” Grayling murmurs rather sorrowfully. “He’s a perfectly nice fellow, but it’s not philosophy. It’s cream-puff stuff. What worries me is that someone will go to it thinking, ‘Ooh, this is an opportunity to think and find out something’, and then they find that it’s actually very shallow and doesn’t have deep roots. And I do think that people who do this kind of thing should really have done some work and got engaged in something serious, and then they won’t make too many mistakes when it comes to trying to introduce others to it.”
I’m not aware if de Botton’s books have been marketed as philosophy per se, but I also don’t remotely care. I’ve read a lot of “deep, serious” philosophy that I found useless. You already know I hold Plato directly responsible for at least half of the stupidest ideas underpinning Western culture. Hegel was a human hot-air balloon. Descartes’ mind/body dualism still plagues otherwise intelligent people. De Botton just strikes me as an intelligent guy who uses readings of philosophy to make sense of everyday life. Philosophy in the sense of “how to live” as opposed to an academic discipline. Give it whatever taxonomy you want. I’d enjoy shooting the breeze with him.
Besides, if self-help books were good enough for David Foster Wallace…

A case can be made that U.S. society is very much obsessed with “self-help,” which involves thinking a whole lot (too much, even) about yourself and your own problems, seeing everything only as it relates to the self, rather than seeing oneself as a valuable part of a larger valuable whole; this is one of the themes of The Pale King.

Yes, exactly. I see it as being similar to spiritual-not-religiousness in that regard; reinforcing rather than challenging the very egotism that causes so many problems. Hopefully that’s what de Botton wants to rehabilitate about the genre.

God Hates Flags

By in fresh hell, old dixie

Pew Research:

Fewer than one-in-ten (8%) say they display the Confederate flag in places such as their home or office, on their car or on their clothing; 91% say they do not. The number that displays the Confederate flag is just a small fraction of the 75% who say they display the American flag in their homes or offices, on their cars or their clothing.
Whites who consider themselves Southerners have a more positive reaction to the Confederate flag than do other whites: 22% say they react positively when they see the Confederate flag displayed, compared with 8% of all whites and just 4% of whites who do not consider themselves Southerners.
That’s funny. I think I see five Confederate flags just within a couple-mile radius of my house. Anyway:
I don’t need no country, I don’t fly no flag
– Alabama 3
Don’t pledge allegiance to flags, I burn ’em
– Warrior Soul
Patriots? Little boys,
obsessed by Bigness,
Big Pricks, Big Money, Big Bangs.
– W.H. Auden

Paperless Cuts

By in books, environment, technology, unintended consequences

Ted Genoways:

In July, Amazon.com revealed that sales of e-books were now outstripping the sales of hardcover books, with the possibility that their sales will double that of hardcovers by the end of the year. With the appearance of Apple’s iPad in April—and its stunning sales of four million units in its first four months—Barnes & Noble dropped the price of its Nook e-reader and Amazon announced the release of a cheaper version of its Kindle in July. Each of these companies is expected to unveil souped-up and cheaper e-readers in time for Christmas. All of which has media gurus heralding this as the year that publishing will finally go paperless—and trumpeting that change as the latest step in the greening up of American consumerism.
But the New York Times recently calculated that the environmental impact of a single e-reader—factoring in the use of minerals, water, and fossil fuels along the manufacturing process—is roughly the same as fifty books. At first that sounds encouraging; after all, even the smallest personal library contains fifty volumes. But the real problems come in lifespan. At present, the average e-reader is used less than two years before it is replaced. That means that the nearly ten million e-readers expected to be in use by next year would have to supplant the sales of 250 million new books—not used or rare editions, 250 million new books—each year just to come out footprint-neutral. Considering the fact that the Association of American Publishers estimates that the combined sales of all books in America (adult books, children’s books, textbooks, and religious works) amounted to fewer than 25 million copies last year, we have already increased the environmental impact of reading by tenfold. Moreover, it takes almost exactly fifty times as much fossil fuel production to power an iPad for the hours it takes to read a book as it would take to read the same book on paper by electric light.
By some estimates, small electronics already account for more global carbon emissions than the airline industry, and the wave of new handheld and portable devices—from smartphones to laptops to e-readers—stand poised to wreak untold havoc, much of it in developing nations.
…Taken together, these essays reveal the hidden price of the paperless revolution. Every MacBook and iPad, every Kindle and Droid contains the labor of hundreds of invisible workers, uncounted lives foreshortened by poisoned water and air, and a landscape permanently scarred by our voracious scavenging. No matter how sleek and earth-friendly these devices may appear, they rise from the dirt and are mined with sweat and with blood. This is not to say that our information age is inherently bad. The protests after last year’s elections in Iran were largely organized over Twitter and documented via YouTube. Across Africa, farmers are using smartphones to access daily market prices via the Internet, assuring fairer compensation for their crops. This summer our government used Facebook to enlist and organize volunteers for the cleanup of the Gulf oil spill. But in our rush to embrace the new—the smaller, the faster, the more powerful—we must not confuse revolutionary products with revolutions in production. We must not forget that even in this age of enlightenment, much of the world remains stooped in black tunnels, tracing veins deeper into darkness.
I know a couple gadget-junkies to whom I’m going to enjoy returning their smugness over my extensive book-buying habits. And at least we’re not waging imperial occupations over the trees necessary to produce my books.

In My Room

By in music

I’d never heard of Fred Cornog before now, but if his music resonates with me half as much as his words, I’ll be quite impressed.

Do you continue to work your day job at Home Depot because it gives you access to the kind of people who populate your records?
I am one of those people. I’m basically a working class pawn, a cog in the wheel, who happens to write songs. Maybe I’m more artistically inclined than your average Home Depot employee but, beyond that, I don’t see much of a difference.
Could you ever imagine making a living off of your music?
Of course. But the thing that bothers me is that making a living solely from music nearly always involves a list of compromises that I’m unwilling to make. And, ultimately, the commerce side of things kills the artistic side. When you get semi-successful, you will be asked to tour and promote your music in various ways. Eventually, you’ll end up spending more and more time promoting your music and doing this peripheral bullshit stuff, and less and less time creating music. And, ironically, making music is what made you semi-successful in the first place. An artist must always be aware of this. Don’t fall into the traps. Otherwise, slowly, slowly, the power gets pulled away from you.
You’ve hardly ever played live, and certainly not for well over a decade. Why is this?
When I was a kid, my father used to yell at me constantly to stop playing the piano. He’d scream, “Stop playin’ that damn piano! God damn it, you had all day to play that damn thing! Can’t you see I’m watchin’ the television! I want some peace and quiet, God damn it!” When you’re a kid and you hear this over and over and over, it changes you, and it changes your brain chemistry. Another kid might have started a rock band down at a friend’s house. But me, my father’s wrath drove me inside my mind. It made me want to curl up and hide. So I quietly wrote songs in my room and became a Tascam mini-studio musician. But the catch is, in working alone like this for years and years, and never collaborating with other musicians, my methodology has somewhat crippled me. I’m not complaining and it’s not sad or anything. That’s just the way it is.
Another reason is that I’ve never liked being the centre of attention. I have the absolute worst kind of personality for the rock world. When I go out, I like to quietly sit at the back of the bar. The last thing I want to do is stand at the centre of the stage in a fuckin’ spotlight with people staring at me waiting to be entertained.
Do you consider your refusal to ‘play the game’ to be in any way rock ‘n’ roll?
I don’t think that the rebellious spirit of rock ‘n’ roll exists in roll ‘n’ roll anymore. [It] is inhabiting other artforms. The spirit is moving to where there are fewer rules. The spirit is moving to where there isn’t an expectation of money being made. It’s moving away from the marketplace. It always does.
The power of music, man. I know exactly what he means, to be the sort of person who is content to live an anonymous life, secretly, almost furtively being creative, even if it inexorably draws you into a set of circumstances you’d never choose otherwise. I was absolutely driven to write and record music. I wanted to be able to share it with people. And yet I knew that I would almost certainly hate everything that would result from that. For me, fate intervened in the form of an autoimmune disease and kept me from ever having to make a Herculean attempt to square that circle, but it could have ended badly if I had gotten what I thought I wanted. I have decided, though, that before I become penniless and homeless, I’m going to go ahead and finally get whatever recording equipment I need to be, as he said, a mini-studio musician in my bedroom. I don’t care about anything else at this point besides the joy of doing it.
It’s an inner rebellion, though. Like a lot of people, I don’t believe that popular music has any real power to change the world anymore. That window closed by the end of the ’60s, if it was ever truly open to begin with. The system can package and market anything you throw at it, and most bands are content to just keep recycling various beatnik/hippie/punk clichés anyway. I kind of imagine this ideal as something akin to the concept of Bildung among the Aufklärer, a passive, inward-directed refusal to accept prevailing norms. German mysticism is in my DNA, anyway.
Arthur once wrote something to me about the rebellious spirit of rock ‘n’ roll that affirms what Cornog said:

Schiller wrote about the fundamental contrast in cultural history between what he called the naïve and the sentimental — the original, less sophisticated but more powerful kind of art (Homer, e.g.) and the belated, more sophisticated but less visceral and emotionally powerful (modern) art. Something like a transition from naïve to sentimental has happened in rock music, and probably would have happened even if Reaganism and cynical consumerist manipulation had not taken place. Artistic movements that begin spontaneously tend to become more self-conscious and backward-looking as they develop: revolution cools into evolution, and, as with modern jazz, a creeping classicism sets in where once all was anarchy and freshness. That rock and roll is becoming classical music is just one more melancholy truth coming home to aging baby boomers like me.

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