[FRIAM] Lets try this again reaching out for advice and opinions

[Steven A Smith]

I am coming to appreciate more what artists (including poets and
musicians) mean when they talk about their work being collaborative with
their audience (fans, readers, etc.)  

I share your (Glen) sentiment (as something of a shoe-gazer myself) that
I am not in any (specific) way obligated to respond to their work, yet I
do believe that my response (even if it is roughly *intense shoe
gazing*) is an important part of what they are doing.

I remember listening to an NPR story (This American Life?) years ago on
roughly the anniversary of the first public/commercial audio recording
of a musical performance and the reception such a thing had at that
time.  Musicians were supposedly entirely non-plussed by this
development... the anecdotal explanation being that they simply didn't
recognize the *sound* being emitted as being representative of the
art/performance...   it obviously had a central role in some sense, but
by the time *we* came of age (depending on who "we" is here, anywhere
from the early 50s to the 2000s (I know only of one specific member of
this list under 30?) commercial LP and audio tape (reel to reel, 8
track, cassette, ???) recordings were a strong standard in the way we
experienced music.   As a DJ in the early 70s, I was aware that for any
given popular song, there may be several or *many* recorded versions
(usually from different live concerts) with subtle variations and that
*I*, with my "curatorial" role with music felt it very important to know
that *somebody was listening*.   When I allowed requests and
dedications, it was invariably maddening that the callins were almost
exclusively "teeny boppers" asking for the most ridiculously saccharine
music over and over (during Michael Jackson's "Ben" fame, they would
call *while* it was playing to ask me to play it... I set a hard and
fast rule that no song, no matter how popular would ever get played more
than once during my 3-4 hour show.

Of course, Gil's questions/requests here were not intended as
(performance?) art, so this doesn't apply directly.   I know that when
*I* as a question into the air and get absolutely NO response, it is
easy to take the deafening silence personally.  

Sorry Gil... I'm glad you kept asking, even if our advice/answers are
somewhat lame!

- Stve

- Steve
On 7/11/18 5:18 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> Ha!  That's a pretty funny image. The idea that there's a bunch of lurkers bobbing their heads at what someone says seems like something Trump might think. It would be an interesting experiment.  When/if you post some blurb to your favorite medium, be it cocktail party, Twitter, or some mailing list, if nobody responds, do you think: a) everyone must agree with you? b) people see it but don't care? c) people must disagree with you because otherwise they'd argue?, or d) nobody's there?
>
> I've known quite a few musicians who, even while on stage, seem to crave the audience's attention or participation.  They seem to feel that if nobody's dancing (or banging, or moshing, or whatever's appropriate), then their gig is somehow failing.  Being a bit of a shoegazer, myself, it's bizarre to think that the people producing such beautiful audioscapes would ever need, much less want, my feedback.  But they do.
>
>
> On 07/11/2018 11:50 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
>> Glen, your anecdote joins nicely with Jaqueline's question "if this list
>> is dead, where will all the lurkers go?" to create an image of hundreds
>> of heads at hundreds of screens bobbing up and down!
>>
>> This triggers for me, the famous film quote (tagline?) from the Alien 4
>> part trilogy: "In space, nobody can hear you scream".   I'm not a big
>> fan of horror, yet I happen to be (re)reading Stephen King's book on
>> writing aptly titled "On Writing" and of all the horrific movies out
>> there, Alien was the first (and approximately only) one to ever catch my
>> fancy.
>>
>> It also triggers my contemplation/reflection on our collective
>> attraction to Zombie Apocalypse movies... (Night of the Living Dead,
>> Omega Man, et cetera, ad nauseum) and the way this might be a subtly
>> coded set of messages allowing us to engage in the xenophobia we
>> consistently (western society?) seem to return to.