Things you were shockingly old when you learned

The tracks, on Blood On The Tracks, are the songs.

― nate woolls, Tuesday, March 5, 2024 12:17 AM (thirteen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

my mind is seriously blown by this

That the poor spelling and punctuation in scam emails is there primarily to weed out intelligent people, who are more likely to spot it and less likely to fall for said scam anyway. Also non-native speakers but that's probably just collateral damage for the scammers.

Uhhh, Morton Downey, Jr. was the nephew of Joan and Constance Bennett?! lolwut

And the son of Morton Downey, apparently!

In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, cars drove on the left. After its dissolution, the successor countries gradually switched to the right, the last being Czechoslovakia in 1938 and Hungary in 1941.

Belgium and the Netherlands also used to drive on the left. As did Sweden and Iceland which only changed in the late 60s.

Esso is an abbreviation for Standard Oil

― alpaca lips now (Ye Mad Puffin), Tuesday, March 5, 2024 5:30 AM (eighteen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Whereas Exxon means absolutely nothing. It's just a word randomly generated by a computer, chosen because it (supposedly) has no meaning or negative connotation in any language.

this isn't anywhere recent, but i was way too old to have caught the "beat" part in the beatles

Yeah further pun on Buddy Holly's backingband the Crickets.
Billy Bragg has a famous artist suggesting the spelling change but I've also seen it credited to Stu Sutcliffe and John Lennon. I think Lennon enjoyed puns anyway.
But have heard initial band name was Silver BeEtles and others Silver BeAtles.

Whereas Exxon means absolutely nothing. It's just a word randomly generated by a computer, chosen because it (supposedly) has no meaning or negative connotation in any language.

The husband was listening to a podcast (maybe some of you also heard it) where they claimed that the word "escalate" derives from "escalator", which is a brand name devised by the Otis lift company. They invented elevators, then they invented "the Escalator moving stairs", and then the word took off from there. I can't get my head around this fact at all.

there's a bunch of words that like metonymically derive from products aren't there. Hoover, google, et al.
Seems like language amorphously adopts things, like folk music adopts tunes from theatrical shows and after a while you can't see the join.
Funny when the word is borrowed from a long defunct product.

Wow @ escalator.

etymonline concurs here: terms like escalation do largely derive from the specific brand name for the type of commercial moving staircase, but it also notes that the french word escalade and the spanish word escalada long pre-existed (and presumably somewhat inspired) this brand name

I thought escalate just felt too much like an old language word with some old Latin shit in there or something, that's how I determine the age of words - I feel them like you would checking the freshness of some veg in a supermarket.

yeah middle school latin always indicated to brain that escalate was a normal natural etymology, not a product. cool.

wait til i tell u abouts kleenex, turns out that’s fake too

xxxxxp during the american occupation of japan following wwii, the americans required that okinawa (but not the japanese mainland) drive on the right. after it reverted to local rule, okinawa switched from right to left overnight in july 1978

730 (transport)

https://img.atlasobscura.com/60rsH48yQ6ZO5lIaLpLG-p72SfF40gfkSKMgRG46ihM/rs:fill:12000:12000/q:81/sm:1/scp:1/ar:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9hdGxh/cy1kZXYuczMuYW1h/em9uYXdzLmNvbS91/cGxvYWRzL2Fzc2V0/cy83YjU5YzBiZi00/YjM4LTQxODQtODBi/YS02ZGI0ZjdjM2Fj/ZjZjMzgzZmFmZTIw/MmRiMWI2ZTRfb2tp/bmF3YW1vbnVtZW50/LmpwZw.jpg

Okinawa is the only place I've driven (an automobile) LHT and it was mostly fine EXCEPT when you have to make a sudden left or right turn, you have to really overcome the muscle memory to turn sharper or shallower than your brane is wired to expect.

xp

l'escalier is staircase en francais, so there's that. also part of one of my favorite terms: l'esprit d'escalier.

Could also be apocryphal but the escalator thing (which is blowing my mind) reminds me that someone once told me that the name Wendy was invented by JM Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, and that there is no record of the name prior to the publishing of the book

i was way too old to have caught the "beat" part in the beatles

We talked about starting a band called The Beetle, to see how long until we got a cease & desist

Still one of my fave “parenting of a young music nerd” experiences was hearing my 8 year old ask me what i thought of macca’s post-beatles band “The Wings.” and amidst larfs, tryna figure out if “Wings” were ever “The Wings.”

I would have told him that if he ever brought up Wings again, he was going to get sent to prison.

sorry for assumed gender of child, apologies

Otis always knew how to brand

.. I thought Wendy is just short for Gwendolyn...

were they the Silver Beatles or the Silver Beetles?

oh, both

> He suggested changing the band's name to Beatals, as a tribute to Buddy Holly and the Crickets. They used this name until May, when they became the Silver Beetles

then the Silver Beatles, then just the Beatles

Otis always knew how to brand

get drunk, stay drunk is very memorable and he executed rly well

Donknotts.jpg

J M Barrie's daughter had an imaginary friend, iirc; her little friendy-wendy. In the UK the forename Darren didn't exist before Bewitched was shown here.

and tracy became popular only after the advent of spencer tracy

Bewitched also responsible for a major resurgence of the name Tabitha which had been very out of fashion

I really like that name. I was thinking about it recently. I've never met one!

Bewitched was also v popular in 60s Japan especially among girls, who loved the idea of living a normal life but secretly having magic powers.
this directly led to the creation of "magical girl" shows for girls, a huge subgenre e.g. Sailor Moon, and shows are still being made to this day.

so I found an old thread where I said "run the gamete of emotions" and someone was laughing, thinking I was making a pun, and today I realized it's spelled 'gamut' and although I knew "gamete" also meant reproductive cell, I thought it had a secondary meaning and not that I was, like, well, spelling another word wrong.

Holy shit

Introduced to musique concrete pretty young, like Davidovsky age 10 or something. Have typed and spoken the term upwards of 100k times in my life, have some 75 records on vinyl that could be classified as musique concrete. I’m a fan.

I realized this morning that “musique concrete” is a literal description of the immovability of the material. I have thought until just now that the “concrete” was a broader aesthetic descriptor. “The sound of asphalt”, that is. God I am dense

I thought it meant the use of "concrete" sounds, as in sounds that exist in the real world as opposed to electronic sound.

I tried reading Pierre Schaeffer's book on it but gave up half way through.

it arrives a little after max bill's concrete art and a little before the brazilian concrete poetry movement, so even when the practical analogies (of material, of method) are not necessarily easy to draw between these different artforms, the word was clearly in the air in the late 1940s, meaning as a minimum "this thing we're doing now"

it also (maybe slightly retroactively?) is in opposition to 'abstract music', which was for Schaeffer the Germans doing sums on their calculators and fiddling around with how to organise notes without, says he and other common criticism, much concern for what was going on sonically.

my understanding is basically identical to yours. i guess i've always understood it in the sense of "concret" = tangible, palpable. so it's like a music of textures that to some extent compels the composer to make decisions based on the sounds themselves, rather than from a theoretical formulation about a relationship between intervals (i.e., "abstract" music, like you say)

... I always understood it like Tom D.

This is Schaeffer from his second journal (1950-51), as published in A la recherche d'une musique concrete in 1952, when he was still setting out his stall. Electronic music and Darmstadt ultra-serialism were not at that point the juggernauts they would become over rhe nest few years.

(also adding: the entire text of recherche was not translated until 2012 afaict. I can't judge from the Englished PDF I have if any of the text was adjusted in subsequent years, though I suspect it wouldn't be titled “journal" if it was: Schaeffer iirc was given to having changes of heart about seemingly basic stuff, especially theoretical stuff… )

"Let us pass over the dispute about terminology. Beyond the question of terminology I am happy to enter into debate: in the same way, where figurative and nonfigurative painting are concerned, the debate, if it is about the word painting, is of no interest. It should be about the thing itself. In other words, painting fifty years ago was a representation, and also, it goes without saying, an interpretation. The cubist break with this introduced a new subject for painting, so-called abstract painting. Simi­larly, with Western music, for centuries music was expression, i.e., lan­guage. Suddenly concrete music to some extent breaks with this, and instead of language it introduces an object that no longer has to express itself. The contrasting adjectives— "abstract" for painting and "concrete" for music— in fact demonstrate how alike they are. Classically, music and painting are indeed at opposite poles from each other, at the two poles of reality. Painting is born of an external reality, a spatial and material world. Music, which can be nonfigurative, is born of an inner reality. It is easy to establish connections between concrete music and abstract painting, tangible realities, whereas descriptive music is as illusory as musical painting. Some works of concrete music immediately call for graphic translation, and it would not be impossible, for example, to compose a concrete music based on an abstract painting and which would express the similarities of matter and form. Such a painting would in any case be a better score than notes on lined paper. And so there are indubitably connections between these two new phenomena that build a bridge, this time firm, between painting and music.

"Often, in the course of the doubts that assailed me over these last four years, I would take heart by thinking that the adventure begun by cuiism was continuing under my very eyes. And yet painters had been faced with the problem of a new art for fifty years without its being so clearly resolved. How, after four years, could we reasonably demand of concrete music that it define itself as a new music or as an antimusic? Perhaps we should have baptized it "plastic music" or "sound plastic"? Why would I, who often left the studio as sick at heart as from an exhibi­tion of modern painting, tempted to destroy it all, have persevered if not because of that great precedent? Several generations of painters had persevered in abstract painting, which some of them were even beginning to call 'concrete,' in just the same way that I could have called what we had undertaken 'abstract music'. Only the future would give an­ swers, and perhaps there would be several."

part of the issue here is that he seems to want to use abstract in two colliding ways:
(i) to argue that ALL scored music (and not just the slide-rule-clutching weirdo avant-garde) (which as noted had not yet really foregathered in 1950-51) is abstract in the sense that it emerges from organisations of the written note as the basic figure
(ii) to argue that "concrete" in music means much the same as "abstract" has come to mean in art, viz an epochal break with the practice of the past

it is a bit weird to say "concrete" and "abstract" mean the same thing....

or not the same maybe but "alike"

… the practical analogies (of material, of method) are not necessarily easy to draw between these different artforms …

― mark s, Sunday, 10 March 2024 14:34 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

in fact i think schaeffer was never a particularly strong or clear-headed theoretician/rhetorician -- esp.when up against cage or stockhausen or lol o/g wordthug boulez -- but he had actually established the deeper and more radical project: a lasting school of research studios into the practicalities of the artistic organisation of all possible sound

but he is correct that “abstract“ is a perfectly plausible term for all music ever and to intuit that this introduces a big muddle into the binary (and ditto the noise/signal binary) -- or would be correct if he had said this out loud early on and constructed his arguments around it

the philosopher paul feyerabend's last, unfinished work was about the centuries-long project of western society to abstract the wrinkly real world - which he calls the world of "abundance" - into reductive schemas that allow for rapid exchange, problem-solving, reproduction, etc - which were in turn regarded as more real. and that the success of this project in certain critical fields eg technology was such that abundance was "conquered". (the full title of the pieced-together book is "the conquest of abundance: a tale of abstraction versus the richness of being")

seems like "concrete" music aligns with an attempt to insist on the irreducibility of the wrinkles (possibly a point of view made more thinkable by the advent of recording technology)

Xenakis was very unimpressed by Schaeffer's attempts at theorizing but thought he was right about concrete music v. electronic music.

me sowing (= finding a second-hand copy of xenakis's book formalized music that wasn't insanely expensive): "haha fuck yeah!!! yes!!"
me reaping (= attempting to read my inexpensive second-hand copy of xenakis's book formalized music): "well this fucking sucks"

(it is VERY mathsy)

Thanks Tracer, that Feyerabend sounds interesting....

So who has been most successful then?What is the "wrinkleiest" music ever?

(xp) I've got a book of interviews with Xenakis, I will stick to that.

Sophie Winkleman (Big Suze in Peep Show & now a minor royal) is Claudia Winkleman's half-sister.

Clue was in the name I guess