the band Crowded House missed some opportunities for some great album titles

I was thinking they could have gone with Rent Control or, even better, Pet Deposit.

Many a post I've written over the years is long and completely serious, and with cause.  I don't plan to become frivolous as a matter of course.  But sometimes, sometimes I have to put up something silly for its own sake.  Pet Deposit is fun because, well, for pet owners present or past the ambiguity leaps out at you.  Is it the kind you collect when you move out, is it non-refundable, or is it the kind your pet deposits on the floor that you have to clean up?  

something a little old, Freddie deBoer's ardent "Everything is not a remix, against popular deepity", a sideways riff on pastiche eclecticism as the aesthetic question or challenge of the modern era according to Leonard Meyer

https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/everything-is-not-a-remix-c6f04e442305
It's no surprise at all that a socialist with openly Marxist interests would argue against Jungian and neo-Jungian archetypes.  I mean, talk about reification!  :)  But, somewhat more seriously, his objections to the propensity of our age to peddle "deepity" seem worth reading.  

Ted Gioia, "Can We Please Stop Talking About Rebranding Classical Music?"

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/can-we-stop-talking-about-rebranding

…

How do we manage the trade-off between past and present? When I launched a jazz website some years back, I decided that my preferred balance was 50/50—half of the coverage would focus on current music, and the other half on the rich jazz heritage. Others might have different views, but I thought that was the ideal mix. And though classical music is different from jazz, with a much longer tradition, we won’t have a healthy art form if 80 or 90 percent of our attention goes to the same works that were programmed fifty or a hundred years ago.

 

Looking at the leading classical music institutions from the outside, I can only guess what causes the current dysfunction, but my hunch is that decision-making is too dominated by internal boardroom meetings, office politicking, and a deep-seated reluctance to do anything new and risky. I’ve also learned from personal experience that even the top people at leading classical music institutions often seem unaware of what’s happening right now in their own art form—caught up instead on media-promoted trends and fashionable names.

…

Presented for the time being without comment.  

Is Convention Really the Deadliest Threat to Art? A response to John Borstlap

http://subterraneanreview.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-threat-of-convention.html

…

This means that convention is always the deadliest threat to art, also today where convention simply has taken other forms than in the past but functions in the same way.

 There are two terms in this axiom that are left undefined. While “art” is ultimately the most critical term I’m restricting myself to discussing the term “convention”.  I’ve read Borstlap’s work for a few years now and can make a case that his pat axiom quoted above belies the way he actually references convention in his polemics against specific strands of modernism in music or, as he more often prefers to call it, sonic art. 

To get something out of the way immediately, I’m neither a fan of John Cage nor of the New Complexity nor of most variations of integral serialism.  In other words, if you know who Borstlap is then this is not going to be a defense of the kinds of sonic arts he doesn’t regard as even being music.  What this will be, as I noted above, is an examination of a tension between Borstlap’s axiom and his actual arguments about specific avant gardists from the last century. 

in an early July sermon Driscoll sounded off on "virtue signaling" and the secular righteousness of "destroying the right people".

https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1415068679654477834

3:00 PM · Jul 13, 2021

The sense of righteousness in our culture, it's not just religious, it's very secular.  Do you have the right hashtag? Are you funding the right cause? Are you lik[ing]-are you cancelling the right people? Are you attacking and destroying the right people? Are you defending the people that are on our team? Are you, are you having head-on collisions that are on their team?

And all of it is friends, it's virtue signaling, it's secular righteousness, and it's people who are trying to perform outwardly rather than being born again inwardly.