Posts tagged brian eno

Changes in the ease of access to different cultural sources are definitely shifting what it means for something to be cool or uncool—especially, of course, for those with some amount of cultural power. I often wonder, though, whether this is a forward or a lateral shift. True, the old and the foreign can now be hip, but—if my own music tastes offer judgment—it just means that the new and mainstream are just correspondingly less interesting. (See also Jody Rosen's takedown of NPR's taste in black music, the "Dead-Old-Retro-Foreign Matrix") An age of cherry-picking might provide for a lot of desserts and clever mixed drinks, but not, alas, much meat.

re: brian eno, cool, horizons of the possible, music

Nate:

We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.

I think this is good news. As people become increasingly comfortable with drawing their culture from a rich range of sources—cherry-picking whatever makes sense to them—it becomes more natural to do the same thing with their social, political and other cultural ideas. The sharing of art is a precursor to the sharing of other human experiences, for what is pleasurable in art becomes thinkable in life.

Brian Eno visits Oberammergau, in Upper Bavaria, where the community has put on a Passion Play every 10 years since the early 17th century, a perpetual thanks-offering for the city's delivery from the plague. I didn't know they did additional city-wide plays during the interim years. Good for tourism, no doubt, and once your town's been community-theater-mad for 300+ years, why not?

re: brian eno, community, cultivation and creation, europe, germany, kevin kelly, performing arts

Nate:

What I went to last night was not the full-blown Passion play - that won’t happen until 2010  (they’re working on it now). I attended instead a play called JEREMIAS, written by the Jewish pacifist Stefan Zweig in 1933, which featured a relatively modest cast of 500, ranging in age from 3 to 80.  The criterion for being in a play is that you should be born in Oberammergau or have lived there for 20 years. The current director is Christian Stückl, a local man who directed his first Passion at the tender age of 28 (making him the youngest director in the long history of the play). Stückl told us that, in the 2000 Passion, a group of Muslim inhabitants of the town asked if they could be included: they’d by that time fulfilled the 20 year residency criterion. After enormous discussion during which the Muslim folk elucidated the parallels between the Koran and the Bible, they were included.