When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it’s done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.
Sometimes they’re of my own creation, as well – and they’re just as annoying. It’s not only other people’s ear worms that bug me, it’s my own, as well.
Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.
The handbook always tells you what it does, and you can be quite sure that if it’s a complex device it can do at least fifteen other things that weren’t predicted in the handbook, or that they didn’t consider desirable. It’s normally those other things that interest me.
I still do mostly listen to CDs. I think that every format really is a different way of listening. If you take a different sort of psychological stance to it – like, I think the transition from vinyl to CD definitely marked a difference in the way people treated music.
The vinyl commands a certain kind of reverence because it’s a big object and quite fragile so you handle it rather carefully, and it’s expensive so you pay attention to how it’s looked after.
