In through the back door

This is why musical semiotics is so, so, very fun. Such a brilliant idea to have decided to write an honours essay on it. Is it any wonder it's taken me an extra year?



Figure 5. Shepherd and Wicke's model of sonic signification.
(From Music and Cultural Theory. Mostly pages 152-82, but see especially their diagrams on 165 and 173 )

Why Anthropology?

"The famous anthropological absorption with the (to us) exotic — Berber horsemen, Jewish peddlers, French Legionnaires — is thus, esseentially a device for displacing the dulling sense of familiarity with which the mysteriousness of our own ability to relate perceptively to one another is concealed from us. Looking at the ordinary in places where it takes unaccustomed forms brings out not, as so often been claimed, the arbitrariness of human behaviour (there is nothing especially arbitrary about taking sheep theft for insolence in Morocco) but the degree to which its meaning varies according to the pattern of life by which it is informed. Understanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity. (The more I manage to follow what the Moroccans are up to the, the more logical, and the more singular, they seem.) It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity."
-Clifford Geertz. The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books) p.14.

This is why I sometimes tie myself into knots with words

How can any expression be believable and authentic if it isn't qualified and self-doubting? (Somehow questioning itself, self-undermining...)

This rocks pretty damn hard

Such a massively gorgeous drum and guitar sound. And sheer fun instead of the dreary seriousness of so much 'hard rock.'

If you want to watch it within the youtube site try:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu6wJveSWRU