Monday, August 13, 2018

iPads and Scores and TV Interviews

A couple of interesting items this morning. First of all, according to Slipped Disc, the Orchestre National d’Ile-de-France is giving all its musicians iPads to replace the traditional printed parts in performances. This is a very cool idea, of course. Music notation works best as a constantly scrolling stream, an option common with music software. Page turns are just awkward. I have seen string quartets using iPads or laptops instead of printed parts a few times. Mind you, on one occasion there was an interesting problem. You typically have a little foot switch you use to turn the page. On this occasion, due to some Bluetooth error, the cellist was discovering that every time the violist turned his page, the cellist's page turned as well! In the comments to the Slipped Disc post one musician mentions that it ain't gonna be easy to change fingerings or bowings in rehearsal! There is something to be said for paper easily edited with a pencil and an eraser.

Kanye West always manages to make the news and a little controversy came out of his interview on Jimmy Kimmel this past Thursday. Here is the interview:


I found a few things interesting. West has a kind of childlike demeanor with occasional bursts of wisdom. For example, I liked his comment that "in this world we live in there are two main motivating forces--that's love or fear." That's not a bad thing to keep in mind. It reminds me of one of Patton's sayings, "never take counsel of your fears" which apparently he stole from Stonewall Jackson. In any case, it is good to remind ourselves from time to time, not to be ruled by our fears. Of course, there are other motivating forces and Kanye mentions pride. Another couple are greed and curiosity. I think curiosity is a really important one, often left off lists of virtues.

Kanye is a musician and designer so the way he thinks is probably not primarily in terms of verbal logic, but rather visual or musical logic. He mentions that he is not about politics or policy, but about not being afraid to say something outside what is supposedly permitted for an African-American (his term). This was the character of his response when Jimmy Kimmel brought up Trump. At one point Kanye says "we could have a dialogue about the President and not a diatribe." He then goes on to say that love can cure hate and so on. Then Jimmy Kimmel interrupts with the usual litany of leftist criticism (or perhaps, more accurately, smears) of Trump: tearing families apart, how he cares about nobody, etc. Kimmel really wasn't listening, was he? This was the jarring, inappropriate element. We didn't use to insert our political ideology into every corner of life--there was a time when we would have thought that demanding that a rapper defend the political policies of a current administration was absurd. I suspect that time was not that long ago, either.

What I really liked about Kanye's reply was that there wasn't one. Soon after they went to a commercial break and he never answered the "question." These kinds of things are really not actual questions are they, but rather ideological traps? The National Post had a piece on it where they reported on Kanye's tweeting that he wasn't stumped by the question but was thinking how best to answer and then was cut off. That is a very polite way, perhaps, of saying, that the nastiness of the question was simply embarrassing. There is a word we rarely use these days, but it keeps coming to mind: this kind of verbal interaction is really impertinent, rude, disrespectful, not only to the person being criticized, but also to the interview guest. In my experience, there are really only two ways to handle this kind of argument: either stop them in their tracks before they have a chance to hurl much, or simply refuse to engage. Kanye chose the more politic way.

Now let's have something to clear the palate with. Here is a really lovely piece for guitar by perhaps the greatest guitar composer of the 20th century, Joaquin Rodrigo. It is too long to be a short piece and too short to be a long piece, so it was not included in my recent top ten lists. Which is why I want to mention it now. This is the Invocation and Dance by Rodrigo played by Pepe Romero:


21 comments:

  1. Does calling someone crooked, a dog, a low-life, foul-mouthed, weak, stupid, low IQ, a total mess, a loser, crazed, nasty, qualify as ‘smears’?

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  2. Now, you see, you have to specify because Trump and his deplorable followers have been called all that and more. You forgot "low energy."

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  3. I didn't forget anything. There wasn't enough space. Was accusing the President of the US of not being an American citizen a smear? Of lying about his birthplace? Were those smears?

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  4. I think that "birther" accusation was first made by the Hillary Clinton campaign, wasn't it?

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  5. The ‘she/he started it’ defense isn’t effective on the playground much less when it's used as a talking point coming from the President of the US.

    Quote from : https://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/birther-movement-founder-trump-clinton-228304
    "After years of denying the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency, it was only in the midst of his own presidential campaign that Donald Trump began falsely claiming Hillary Clinton was the true progenitor of the “birther” conspiracy theory claiming Obama was not born in the United States. But that’s swapping one discredited claim for another. Numerous fact checks, reports and interviews — in 2008 and 2011, when Trump revived the controversy — revealed that although some Clinton supporters circulated rumors about Obama’s citizenship, the campaign and Clinton herself never trafficked in it."

    But does it really matter who started it? It was Trump’s original ‘fake news’ and a very effective 'smear' since a large percentage of Republicans still believe it.

    My real point about your piece, however, is that you don’t seem to see the irony of a Trump supporter decrying 'impertinent, rude, disrespectful, behavior’. I don't have a tv but I can watch clips of Trump and read his tweets. Let's just hope his policies are successful enough or the country to compensate for the 'impertinent,rude, disrespecful, behavior' he demonstrates regularly.

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  6. Actually, that was not intended as a defence of Trump, just an observation that nasty politics is common to both sides. I observe a policy here at the Music Salon of not doing political debates unless they relate to music, which was my justification for mentioning the Kanye West interview. I see lots of irony everywhere!

    If I were going to defend Trump, I would certainly include a discussion of the economy, though.

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  7. And I might link to this article:

    https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/editorial-collusion-media-bias/

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  8. Was George W Bush responsible for the crash of the economy in 2008? Was Clinton responsible for the boom during his presidency? Should Obama really get credit for ‘saving’ the economy during his tenure? Is the out of control deficit Trump’s fault? The economy is complicated. Let’s wait a bit before judging this president. He’s not even halfway through his first term. Getting 'objective' news is difficult. Check out these links:
    https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Investor%27s_Business_Daily
    Investor's Business Daily (IBD) is an American "newspaper" (with associated website) that (obviously) covers mostly financial, business, and investment news. Its op-eds are, similarly, chock-full of Ben Steinery along with numerous denialist hit pieces, astroturf, and mouthing off by bottom-of-the-barrel wingnuts (e.g., Brent Bozell) in a way that makes the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal look like the Daily Worker.
    Their editorial cartoons can get very nutty,[1] and their anti-environmentalism can reach astounding heights.[2] At times, they venture into full-on, balls-out conspiracy theory territory when it comes to global warming, including accusing NASA and NOAA of conspiring to manipulate data[3] and fabricated the now popular denialist talking point that James Hansen is a shill for George Soros.[4] (Oh, can't forget Climategate, of course, they were all over that.) This is even less surprising when you notice that they let lobbyists and PR reps for denialist think tanks like the Heartland Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute and experts for hire like Michael Fumento pen their bullshit all over IBD's pages. There's the other usual anti-environmental nonsense as well, including DDT denial and second-hand smoke denial.
    IBD's most infamous op-ed was one that, in trying to make an argument against Obamacare, claimed Stephen Hawking would have been euthanized by the NHS if he lived in Britain. Hawking then replied that he credits the NHS with saving his life. In true IBD fashion, they then issued a "correction" noting that the "implication" in the column that Hawking was not a citizen of the UK had been "fixed."[5] They still post less than-accurate-information on Obamacare to this day.
    On personal finance matters, IBD promotes investing using CAN SLIM, a pseudoscientific technical analysis of stocks developed by IBD founder William J. O'Neil. One of the claims frequently found in IBD is that a price graph in a "cup and handle" shape indicates an ideal time to buy a stock.

    And this:https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/investors-business-daily/ "Overall, we would rate Investors Business Daily Right Biased based on right-leaning economic and market positions. We would also give them a high factual rating on strictly investing and market news. However, editorially IBT is clearly a questionable source with promotion of right-wing conspiracy theories and numerous failed fact checks. In sum, we rate them far-right biased and mixed for factual reporting. (6/14/2016) Updated (D. Van Zandt 8/14/2018)

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  9. Christine, what makes you think I want to answer this kind of argument? I have run into this a thousand times. It is a bit like throwing everything against the wall to see what might stick. I cited one article from the IBD about media bias and you respond with a shotgun of claims---claims!--about a hundred other things. I have absolutely no interest in answering criticism of IBD's environmentalist critiques, their style of cartoons, their thoughts on Obamacare or their approach to the technical analysis of stocks. Why would I?

    I think you missed the point of the post entirely: try to consider what might be appropriate to the context.

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  10. The first thing I do when someone sends me a link is to use google to check out the reputation of the source. I also use googled to check the reputations of the ones describing the reputation of the source. The point being there isn't any truly objective media. Left-leaning, right-leaning, there always seems to be a bias. I wasn't expecting an answer from you.

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  11. You’re right, I didn’t respond to the point you were making that the newspapers in publishing their editorials confirmed Trump’s claim of bias. I know the Wall Street Journal refused to join in and I’m too lazy to check if any of the others on the list of several hundred were conservative-leaning or not. As for the length of my post, sorry it was so long. As Blaise Pascal famously said: "I only made this letter longer because I had not the leisure to make it shorter.” It’s what happens when you dash things off at work.

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  12. Heh! The thing is that on the internet there seems to be rather a split, with two warring camps and not much in the middle. But in the mass media there is a huge disparity between conservative-leaning publications and liberal-leaning. This was definitively demonstrated by the mass editorial attack on Trump last week. There is an ironic little comment I have seen a couple of times: Democrats want to shut Republicans up, while Republicans want the Democrats to just keep talking.

    I don't read IBD with any frequency, but yes, it has a conservative slant. I do read the Wall Street Journal regularly and it seems to me to be fairly balanced, believe it or not. The editorial page does have a conservative slant, but they publish a fair amount of contrasting opinions. The news side seems fairly objective. I quit reading the New York Times when I found its animus to Republicans extending even into the travel and food sections!

    I also quit using Google search when it came out that they tend to skew their results. Just this week Google, Apple, Facebook and Spotify all banned a far-right site called Infowars. I have never read it, but it seems to specialize in weird conspiracy theories. It was never suggested that it offered illegal material--just stuff that the Internet giants didn't like. Plus, YouTube shadow-banned the completely innocuous PragerU videos until protest and backlash made them reconsider.

    We live in very fractious times. These days we pretty much have to do own research and make our own judgements.

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  13. RealClearPolitics is the place to go for all points of view. Check it out if you're not too disgusted with American politics. I'm finding it surprisingly entertaining. Never a dull moment!

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  14. I have certainly been to the RealClearPolitics site, but I don't know why I haven't bookmarked it. Just glancing at their links they do seem pretty balanced. The Drudge Report is another one, but more sensationalist.

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  15. I looked on Google to get feedback on the Drudge Report. Apparently, it's more on the Conservative side. Everone will find something that really annoys them on Realclear politics!

    Drudge Report - Wikipedia
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drudge_Report
    The Drudge Report is an American conservative, right-wing news aggregation website. Run by .... from the Newspaper Marketing Agency, the Drudge Report is the number one site referrer for all online UK commercial newspaper websites.

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  16. Just looked at the Drudge report home page. Has a lot of interesting articles I hadn't seen elsewhere.

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  17. Just between us, I find some of the most reliable takes on the issues of the day to be in the Wall Street Journal comments! I don't really trust Wikipedia on controversial issues, nor do I trust Google not to distort search results (I have switched to DuckDuckGo as my search engine). As newspapers go, I find the Wall Street Journal to be fairly reliable, but not always. So I always look to the comments and if all the most popular comments are taking the WSJ to task for inaccuracy or poor judgement or evaluation, then that is a good indicator. The Globe and Mail from Toronto, a paper with a very strong left bias, used to get trashed regularly by their readers in the comment section. They could have tried to be more balanced, but instead they just closed their comment section entirely for a few months and then re-opened it with tight restrictions on who can comment. Problem solved!

    I guess what I am pointing to here is that much of the public narrative space is monitored and controlled by what I would call left-biased ideology. The general population do not share a lot of this and so there is a tension between what is being messaged and how it is received. An open comment section reveals this.

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  18. Thanks for the tip about Duck Duck Go. I'll give it a try. My family members in the States who are right-leaning think Fox news is unbiased and those on the left say it's propaganda and go for CNN. Human nature.

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  19. In Jordan Peterson's recent talk at the Oxford Union he outlines why a healthy political system needs both the liberal and conservative approaches. They fulfill different needs. But the mass media along with academia and the arts tends to skew left. Surveys have found, for example, that on the order of 90% of faculty in the humanities are Democrat donors and supporters. This can't be healthy!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZMIbo_DxJk&t=1993s

    I don't watch either Fox or CNN--I just don't like the hectoring tone of tv news these days!

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  20. Thanks for the link. I think I had already seen that video. I've enjoyed watching debates between Jordan Peterson and other members of the Intellectual Dark Web. Have you seen this? https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/intellectual-dark-web.html

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  21. Yes, I did read most of the NYTimes piece. They really did give it the old college try, but it has a bit of the feeling of someone on safari in Africa, visiting a strange tribe. Still, fairer than the nasty hit job in the New York Review of Books. Did you see the Atlantic article on Peterson? I can't remember if it was a fair portrayal or not.

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