The education establishment in the U.S. has generally treated the computer (a) first as undesirable and shunned it, (b) as sort of like a typewriter, (c) not as a cheap but less legible textbook with smaller pages, etc. (d) as something for AP testing, (e) has not ventured into what is special about computing with reference to modeling ideas and helping to think about them.
This in spite of pioneers such as Seymour Papert explaining both in general (and quite a bit specifically) just what it is and how it can revolutionize education.
I’ve used the analogy of what would happen if you put a piano in every classroom. If there is no other context, you will get a “chopsticks” culture, and maybe even a pop culture. And this is pretty much what is happening.
I’m not saying some musicians are better, it’s just their sensibility is, and I can’t really play with people like that. That’s being a musician. I don’t like musicians, you know what I mean? They like their instrument – I don’t understand that. I don’t understand liking your instrument, it’s just a pain-in-the-ass thing you have to use in order to do what you want to do. Having an interest in your instrument – I don’t understand it, it just makes no sense to me. Why don’t you just stay home and caress it and stuff? Why are you playing for people?
calling themselves the Primitives, they made a little splash by recording a 45 that was immediately taken off the market because Thomas Pynchon sued them. They’d taken the lyrics from his novel V without asking permission.
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The Insect Trust: An American Band Deconstructed : NPR I reread V in 2012, first time since 1998 or 99 and had quite a different reaction to reading about the Whole Sick Crew as a 35 year old father vs a wide-eyed 20 year old. “The eyes of a New York woman/ Are the twilit side of the moon” seemed like the kind of trouble I wanted to get myself into. The song in question:
I felt Laura’s fingers caress my shoulder. In a little while, I realized that Laura was playing, very gently, but it was a game: her pinkie was sunbathing on my shoulder, then her ring finger would pass and they’d greet each other with a kiss, then the thumb would appear and both pinkie and ring finger would flee down the arm. The thumb was then king of the shoulder and would lie down to sleep; it seemed to me that he even ate some vegetable that was growing there, for the fingernail dug into my flesh, until the pinkie and the ring finger returned, accompanied by the middle and index fingers, and all together they would frighten the thumb, who hid behind an ear and spied on the other fingers from there, without understanding why they’d thrown him out, while the others danced on the shoulder and drank and made love and, out of sheer drunkenness, lost their balance and fell off the cliff and down the back, an accident Laura would take advantage of in order to hug me and lightly touch her lips to mine; in the meantime, the four fingers, terribly bruised, would climb up again, clinging to my vertebrae, and the thumb would observe them without ever thinking to leave his ear.
I wrote these songs in San Francisco, in my bay-windowed room overlooking the corner of Page and Laguna. We had tried to have a seance there once when I first moved in, but all that happened was we all got incredibly cold. And then remembered that we lived in San Francisco. Even August is cold. My corner overlooked the many crack and prostitution deals going down, as well as the orderly lines of zen monks from the zen center, proceeding serenely towards the health food store.
—Lida Husik on writing the songs for her second LP Your Bag from 1991. I now live at this very corner.
We drove to the end of a block and Saunders pointed out a run-down house with a basement apartment that had a couple of small, dark windows and a broken concrete patio. It was a grim-looking spot. “That’s where Dave wrote ‘Infinite Jest,’ ” he said. “There should be a plaque there.”
