Don’t worry, I’m not going to crowbar this round to something about platforms.
Kurt Vonnegut, maybe my favourite author, once wrote:
“Which brings us to the arts, whose purpose, in common with astrology, is to use frauds in order to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on inside. And on and on.”
(Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons, 1974)
I’m sitting here on a Sunday afternoon smashing my head off Powerpoint, and for some reason I had a hankering to listen to “I’ve Been High” by REM. So I stuck it on and my God, I’d forgotten how good it was. Here’s a live acoustic version:
Should we look for profundity in a three minute song? Probably not. But we can find just a perfect moment that makes us forget NEST, IMA stats and why the damn boxes won’t line up on Powerpoint. If that’s a fraud then that’s fine with me.
Like I said, just a Sunday afternoon thought.
