Dancing About I-Beams And Wall Hangings
petronia ( The last of the questionnaires):
I've always thought dancing about architecture would be a particularly interesting exercise, because whatever you could effectively demonstrate about architectural structures using choreographed human bodies would probably be immensely complex to convey in any other guise. So complex that it would be dismissed as truism, perhaps...
This reminded me that I'd once answered a question in regard to dancing about architecture when Scott Butki interviewed me by email in 2006 for Blogcritics Magazine. He ended up not using the dancing-about-architecture bit, so here it is:
Preliminary Question: "You know that quote about 'Writing about music is like dancing about architecture'? Do you agree with the assessment that there is something a bit off about writing about music?"
Well, first, you can and do dance about architecture, given that when you dance you take in the physical space around you and what it's generally used for, and adjust your moves accordingly - there are reasons why someone is more likely to dance in a ballroom or a cantina than in a conference room, and it isn't just that music happens to be played or piped into the first two but not the third: why isn't it piped into the third, and why don't people rent out conference rooms for dances in the after hours? And why do people do different dances in ballrooms from the ones they do in cantinas? In a sense, when you dance, you're dancing to social architecture as well as to physical architecture. Whether you're in a slam pit or you're dancing step-to-step with a partner or you're making vaguely rhythmic movements while your partner stares off into space, you're engaging in social relations. You're in the social sight, as it were, of onlookers, and of other dancers.
And when you're talking and writing - not just about music, but about anything - you're doing the same thing. You're engaging in a social dance, maneuvering in relation to your fellows.
As for specific problems: Music is difficult to describe and impossible to convey - the words just aren't there. But that's more of a problem for music journalism than it is for music criticism, since journalism tends to follow the model of a reporter describing events authoritatively. Whereas criticism can be all sorts of generally more interesting things. In my case, I'm most interested in exploring the social dance, so rather than speak with authority, I like to pose questions. E.g., in chapter one [of Real Punks Don't Wear Black] I ask why - in a particular time and place - hate songs were better than love songs. What is the social life that produces these songs?
Criticism doesn't sit well within journalism, since there's always some anti-intellectual bigot up the chain of command who wants facts, not open-ended questions.
I subsequently did a variant on this dancing-about-architecture riff in my first column for the Las Vegas Weekly:
You do dance about architecture, if you think of "architecture" as not just the physical space that encloses you but the social space you move around in, including your dance partner, the other dancers on the floor, the figure you cut when viewed by onlookers. Of course music can also be background music while you're driving and can be a subject of private, intense listening. But such listening rejoins the social dance as soon as you try to communicate it to anyone else, the private self seeing how it appears to others. Out in the world there's a dance of opinions: likes and dislikes circling around each other, parrying, intermingling. So that's my idea for the column, that it be a music column but "music" means the WHOLE thing -- not just what the musician does or what the recording sounds like, but the life of the music, the social dance. Your life, in other words.
I've always thought dancing about architecture would be a particularly interesting exercise, because whatever you could effectively demonstrate about architectural structures using choreographed human bodies would probably be immensely complex to convey in any other guise. So complex that it would be dismissed as truism, perhaps...
This reminded me that I'd once answered a question in regard to dancing about architecture when Scott Butki interviewed me by email in 2006 for Blogcritics Magazine. He ended up not using the dancing-about-architecture bit, so here it is:
Preliminary Question: "You know that quote about 'Writing about music is like dancing about architecture'? Do you agree with the assessment that there is something a bit off about writing about music?"
Well, first, you can and do dance about architecture, given that when you dance you take in the physical space around you and what it's generally used for, and adjust your moves accordingly - there are reasons why someone is more likely to dance in a ballroom or a cantina than in a conference room, and it isn't just that music happens to be played or piped into the first two but not the third: why isn't it piped into the third, and why don't people rent out conference rooms for dances in the after hours? And why do people do different dances in ballrooms from the ones they do in cantinas? In a sense, when you dance, you're dancing to social architecture as well as to physical architecture. Whether you're in a slam pit or you're dancing step-to-step with a partner or you're making vaguely rhythmic movements while your partner stares off into space, you're engaging in social relations. You're in the social sight, as it were, of onlookers, and of other dancers.
And when you're talking and writing - not just about music, but about anything - you're doing the same thing. You're engaging in a social dance, maneuvering in relation to your fellows.
As for specific problems: Music is difficult to describe and impossible to convey - the words just aren't there. But that's more of a problem for music journalism than it is for music criticism, since journalism tends to follow the model of a reporter describing events authoritatively. Whereas criticism can be all sorts of generally more interesting things. In my case, I'm most interested in exploring the social dance, so rather than speak with authority, I like to pose questions. E.g., in chapter one [of Real Punks Don't Wear Black] I ask why - in a particular time and place - hate songs were better than love songs. What is the social life that produces these songs?
Criticism doesn't sit well within journalism, since there's always some anti-intellectual bigot up the chain of command who wants facts, not open-ended questions.
I subsequently did a variant on this dancing-about-architecture riff in my first column for the Las Vegas Weekly:
You do dance about architecture, if you think of "architecture" as not just the physical space that encloses you but the social space you move around in, including your dance partner, the other dancers on the floor, the figure you cut when viewed by onlookers. Of course music can also be background music while you're driving and can be a subject of private, intense listening. But such listening rejoins the social dance as soon as you try to communicate it to anyone else, the private self seeing how it appears to others. Out in the world there's a dance of opinions: likes and dislikes circling around each other, parrying, intermingling. So that's my idea for the column, that it be a music column but "music" means the WHOLE thing -- not just what the musician does or what the recording sounds like, but the life of the music, the social dance. Your life, in other words.