Arthur Lee
I'm touched by Arthur Lee's attitude. I went to school with a boy who had the exact same attitude. Alexander's father worked as a software engineer, I think for IBM, and Alexander was good at mathematics himself, but he liked to play football and did, first in the schoolyard in-between classes, later semi-professionally.
He was always self-conscious about it, doing what he liked, not what pays. Same thing with Arthur Lee, only that he played music. Even the way they looked is similar, I mean their facial expression while looking at something, always asking: Couldn't I?
Arthur Lee did just what he liked and managed to get by all his life, but he lived a meagre life, interrupted by an outrageous conviction for a fired gunshot which, according to the lab test, he did not fire, and cut short by leukemia. Generally perceptive and overall a stoic, he lacked in assessment of his public appeal and didn't cultivate his strengths, but journeyed through different genres without leaving much of an impression.
What in his mind was just an imitation of the Byrds, was to everyone else original, and what in his mind was his own style, sounded to everyone else like an imitation of Jimi Hendrix.
Anyway, there were a number of concerned songs in the early '80s about where society was going, e.g. Jefferson Starship's I Came Back from the Jaws of the Dragon and Supertramp's Crazy and Brother Where You Bound, observing how the power of the common man was evaporating before everybody's eyes, but Love's The Red Telephone is of course a different story. Much is made of social constrictions, starting really with Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser, but more fashionably aimed at the '50s of the last century, and the supposed liberation from them, but Arthur Lee was not liberated from them, he was constantly aware of the necessities of life and the social constrictions they entail, he simply took the time to explore what life could be, feeling semi-guilty about it.
We've been fighting to liberate us from the stubborn demands of nature for a millennium, accepting the conditions of that fight, and it wasn't over in 1967, but its end started to come into sight. The norms we accept do pull us away from what we could be. Why would we have fought, if we hadn't had hope in our hearts for the life we were allowing us by escaping our chores? Arthur Lee sang about it, opium seems to direct the thoughts towards it, but saps the energy to ever reach it, well, we're here: What chores have remained? What is the purpose of our norms? To accept a norm in order to liberate oneself is strength, to accept one to let oneself be controlled against one's will inexcusable.
He was always self-conscious about it, doing what he liked, not what pays. Same thing with Arthur Lee, only that he played music. Even the way they looked is similar, I mean their facial expression while looking at something, always asking: Couldn't I?
Arthur Lee did just what he liked and managed to get by all his life, but he lived a meagre life, interrupted by an outrageous conviction for a fired gunshot which, according to the lab test, he did not fire, and cut short by leukemia. Generally perceptive and overall a stoic, he lacked in assessment of his public appeal and didn't cultivate his strengths, but journeyed through different genres without leaving much of an impression.
What in his mind was just an imitation of the Byrds, was to everyone else original, and what in his mind was his own style, sounded to everyone else like an imitation of Jimi Hendrix.
Anyway, there were a number of concerned songs in the early '80s about where society was going, e.g. Jefferson Starship's I Came Back from the Jaws of the Dragon and Supertramp's Crazy and Brother Where You Bound, observing how the power of the common man was evaporating before everybody's eyes, but Love's The Red Telephone is of course a different story. Much is made of social constrictions, starting really with Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser, but more fashionably aimed at the '50s of the last century, and the supposed liberation from them, but Arthur Lee was not liberated from them, he was constantly aware of the necessities of life and the social constrictions they entail, he simply took the time to explore what life could be, feeling semi-guilty about it.
We've been fighting to liberate us from the stubborn demands of nature for a millennium, accepting the conditions of that fight, and it wasn't over in 1967, but its end started to come into sight. The norms we accept do pull us away from what we could be. Why would we have fought, if we hadn't had hope in our hearts for the life we were allowing us by escaping our chores? Arthur Lee sang about it, opium seems to direct the thoughts towards it, but saps the energy to ever reach it, well, we're here: What chores have remained? What is the purpose of our norms? To accept a norm in order to liberate oneself is strength, to accept one to let oneself be controlled against one's will inexcusable.
Labels: 36, charaktere, formalisierung, geschichte, gesetze, institutionen, sehhilfen, wahrnehmungen, zeitgeschichte, ἰδέα, φιλοσοφία
Eingetragen Am/um
13:13
