Posts Tagged ‘Yoko Ono’
“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”*…
I would like to begin this talk on the future of “popular” music with a few cautionary notes about our ability to see into the future clearly. The fact is, it would appear we are not very good at it. Somewhere back in our Savannah DNA, we got very good at reacting to danger when it presented itself — say a lion or tiger. However, it seems we are less capable of looking ahead to avoid danger. In other words, we are a reactive rather than proactive animal. The contemporary analogy in relation to climate change is that we are similar to the frog in a pot of hot water who does not have the sensors to recognize the increasing temperature and the fact that he should get out of the boiling pot.
Yes, there have been a handful of futurists – H.G Wells, Aldous Huxley, and given the state of many current governments I would grudgingly include Ayn Rand. Probably the most successful futurists in our lifetime may have been Marshall McLuhan and Stanley Kubrick, but even so, all of these writers and film makers have been only partially successful gazing into the crystal ball. Given that the past is no more fixed than the future I begin this conversation with you.
What I hope to discuss in this time with you is the relationship between technology, the gift of music and the commodification of that gift and how that gift and the commodification of the gift has been eroded in the digital age, and as I see it, could continue to be eroded well into the 21st century…
A provocative talk by Ian Tamblyn, a pillar of the Canadian music world, on popular music and its uncertain future: “A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music.”
TotH to friend CE. Image above: source.
* Hunter S. Thompson
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As we pay the piper, we might recall that it was on this date in 1969 that John Lennon and Yoko Ono were married in the British Consul’s office in Gibraltar. “We wanted to get married on a cross-channel ferry – that was the romantic part,” Lennon said in the Beatles Anthology documentary. “We went to Southampton and then we couldn’t get on because she wasn’t English, and she couldn’t get the day visa to go across. They said, ‘Anyway, you can’t get married. The Captain’s not allowed to do it any more.'”
The Vice President will see you now…
A firearms instructor accidentally shot a student while teaching a gun-safety class on Saturday in Fairfield County [Ohio] to people seeking permits to carry concealed weapons.
Terry J. Dunlap Sr., who runs a shooting range and training center at 6995 Coonpath Rd. near Lancaster, was demonstrating a handgun when he fired a .38-caliber bullet that ricocheted off a desk and into student Michael Piemonte’s right arm.
Dunlap, 73, also is a long-time Violet Township trustee who is running for re-election in November.
Yesterday, Piemonte said he feels lucky, and it could have been worse.
He and his wife, Allison, both 26 and residents of Pataskala in Licking County, attended the daylong concealed-carry class together.
“My wife was sitting just inches away from me,” he said. “It could have easily hit her.”
Dunlap apparently didn’t know that the gun was loaded, Piemonte said — “That’s my guess”…
Read the full story in The Columbus Dispatch, and here (from whence, the photo above).
Oh, and as Gawker reports, a Republican state senator in Arkansas who is leading a legislative committee on the subject of giving guns to school teachers accidentally shot a teacher during an “active shooter” drill earlier this year.
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As we load and lock, we might recall that it was on this date in 1971 that John Lennon and Yoko Ono landed in New York City, having left London in the aftermath of the break-up of the Beatles. They took up residence at the Dakota, near what’s now known as “Strawberry Fields,” two years later.
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