Today in The Sunday Times I interview Craig Venter, I review Oliver Sacks and I discuss sex on television.
This excess explains why I have been a bad blogger this week.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Venter, Sacks and Sex
Today in The Sunday Times I interview Craig Venter, I review Oliver Sacks and I discuss sex on television.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
We're constantly reminded that "sex sells" and now it turns out that it doesn't. What modern-day truism is next to fall?
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ReplyDeleteMusic, he points out, “has no concepts, makes no propositions; it lacks images, symbols, the stuff of language. It has no power of representation. It has no necessary relation to the world”. Much can be said and written about music, but the substrate of it all is feeling.
ReplyDeleteTo say music has no necessary relation to the world, though, would seem to necessitate a rather strange and arbitrary notion of "the world." How can something we experience in the world not be intrinsically of the world? The musician is intrinsically (of) the world, unless the world is something less than the world, and the music necessarily relates to his life. He is alive when making the music; one is alive when listening to it; how can we justify cutting life off as exclusing this experience?
Also, I know what he presumably means but to say that it has no powers of representation is to see "the world" in exclusively material terms. That music has the greatest powers of representation is why it can mean so much. Even in visual terms, I don't think it so clear-cut its lack of powers of representation.
Bryan, I don't quite understand how you could hate Sex and the City (I think from a previous post that was your position) but give a thumbs up to Californication. I have only seen one episode of the "C" show, but I reckon it is true that it and "Sex" both treat sex in much the same dispiriting way. The appeal of watching a disillusioned man trying to work his way out of a midlife crisis via the befuddling world of sensory pleasure (which is what I take it Ducovny's show is fundamentally about) has little appeal. Who wants to television spend time with someone like that?
ReplyDeleteSex and the City more delusional and poorly performed compared with C
ReplyDelete...arms race of explicitness... - I think you need a new term here.
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