Or maybe not

Here's a post that doesn't make sense to me: Glen Branca in the NY times on how Music is At An End, or words to that effect. I don't know very much about music - my art form happens to be beer - but I have ears and it doesn't sound to me as if music is at an end. After all, if there is no new music, why is it that I'm always hearing new music? Plus, I don't like the squishy way this is written - check out the 'Maybe' construction here:

Muzak’s been around for a long time now but maybe people just can’t tell the difference anymore. Maybe even the composers and songwriters can’t tell the difference either.

You see the flaw with the Maybe clause at once, of course, and here it's heightened by the even more revolting 'Maybe even...either' construction. Luckily no one has ever read a Maybe of this shabby sort without immediately, and correctly, thinking to oneself, 'Or maybe not'. Because of course anyone can tell the difference between Muzak and music. Muzak is a protected brand name, for one thing. Ask any lawyer.

On the other hand, here's a post I really liked: Andrew Durkin on music-making as bricolage, cobbled together out of what is at hand. It isn't new, and it is. Roger Corman, quoted extensively in the post, made all those great Edgar Allan Poe movies with Vincent Price - 'Masque of the Red Death', 'Pit and the Pendulum', and so forth - those are going on the Netflix queue immediately. There's a great bit in 'Masque of the Red Death' when the evil prince played by Price realizes who the fellow in the red mask - or rather 'masque', I guess, excuse me - really is, and then flees through all the differently colored rooms of his palace. To no avail. So are those movies new, are they art? Was there any point to making them? God knows, but they are fun to watch. Anyway, it was nice to run into Durkin after Branca, and it had the effect of an antidote.

Here's a pumpkin masque, carved by my wife a couple of Halloweens ago. I inexplicably failed to document her jack-o-lantern activity this year, even though it was a banner year for her, in my opinion. You'll have to take my word for it, but her 2009 efforts were unlike any pumpkins ever carved before. They had a brand new eeriness. They provoked feelings of uneasiness never before provoked. I really should have taken a picture or two, but we'll have to settle for this.