It isn’t often that I find myself agreeing with Jan Guillou, but now it has happened twice in as many months. The issue at hand is the Swedish sanction for the nationwide wolf hunt, where thousands of understimulated Swedish “hunters” (or, to paraphrase a popular online RPG, “hun-tards”) set out to kill of a predetermined number of wolves (a number that they have exceeded, incidentally) under the pretext that the small population are at risk of becoming inbred due to an insufficient gene pool.
A few words then, on our cultural narrative and the way the lack of it is affecting our modern perception of knowledge. I’ve previously stated my findings on how the written word is best suited to the slow process of reading a book and scorned the prophesy of the e-book as the sole purveyor of literature in our modernity.
It is truly remarkable, and a sign of the progression of ages, that whenever we speak of rock music we see it as a profound expression of western thinking and culture. Remarkable in the sense that rock music (and its derivatives) owes its roots to Africa, and is in structure essentially a form of noise – where truly western, in the sense of European, music strives to eliminate as much noise as possible in both instrument and lyrics. It amuses me no end that some cultures see rock music as the pinnacle threat set upon them by the west.
According to URLai, a rather amusing web service, I am 66-100 years old (see it here). Amusing indeed.
To be sophisticated and thoughtful isn't exactly to be modern in these times of banality. The John Abercrombie Quartet, however, is precisely that.
It strikes me that the more talent someone has, the more likely they are to doubt and question it.
