little bits of everything

Insert discussion of the original meaning of the word meme and what it now means here. Memes are supposed to be understood by lots of people without explanation. This one fails. I've been visiting Universities with one of my sons, looking at their Music Tech courses. (Insert link to blog post about thoughts on that when it's written.) At Portsmouth they had an analogue mixing desk that used to be used by Coldplay. The guy showing us round made some disparaging remark about their music. I wish I'd been quicker off the mark and asked, "Couldn't even Brian Eno" have saved them. For Brian has breathed on music by U2 and Coldplay and probably other people and made it more shiny. There was a BBC documentary a few years ago about him and I remember a bit from it where he said that he doesn't go on the internet as he would find it too distracting. I can't remember the exact words, but it was along the lines that it would ruin his creativity. Pictu...

Is there a song that you could listen to over and over again for the rest of your life without getting fed up of it? Is there a song where you think, "I want to live in this song. I want the intro to be my porch. I want to walk on the bass, to sit on the synth line and watch the melody. I want to sleep on the repeat to fade until it all starts again." This quote from Laura Potter has captured a nagging feeling I've had for a while: A significant amount of time and money are spent exploring ways to increase our emotional ‘attachment’ to products, yet we become attached to what objects signify, or to whom they refer, not directly or materially to what they are. I’m not convinced there is any point trying to actively design attachment into things, because the conditions under which objects become personally significant are highly subjective: either contextually dependent or serendipitously evolved. I'm taking it out of context, and it goes on to talk about making...