If we had been limited to mainstream media this weekend, with the exception of BBC's Persian service , we'd have almost completely missed news of the events in Iran. Traditional media institutions — aside from the fact that they never perform well on weekends — simply don't have the agility and networks of witnesses to cover stories that are not lead by releases from official sources and move faster than hourly deadlines. Internet reporting, on the other hand, while often — and wisely — having to carry caveats about verifiability, have proven themselves to have both considerable agility and a astonishing breadth of networked resources, many of them appearing nearly spontaneously. (I'm personally amazed that two of the best sources have been diaries at the (left) Daily Kos and (conservative) Andrew Sullivan's page; new pages of photodocumentation from inside Iran and translations of twitter messages have also been very informative.) I have no doubt that, with th...
Ron Silliman points to this post with the statement Why memorizing poetry is inherently right wing . The question of memorization is, of course, sometimes an important one for musical performance as well and sometimes we musicians also make a similar distinction between rote and "by heart" memorization. Generally speaking, the pro-memorization camp is our conservative party and it is typical for competitions and recitals on the establishment circuit to insist that musicians play without sheet music visible on stage. (This insistence comes with that same weird macho-but-prissy swagger that only conservative pseudo-intellectuals carry.) While there are cases in which getting rid of the paper is unavoidable — in opera, for example, or with some percussion instruments for which visual contact with a music stand cannot be maintained —, I side decidedly with the opposition party here. This is because when playing notated music one can too frequently discover that notation ...
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