Anyway, Radiohead released this statement in response:

“In response to purely speculative figures announced in the press regarding the number of downloads and the price paid for the album, the group’s representatives would like to remind people that… it is impossible for outside organisations to have accurate figures on sales.

However, they can confirm that the figures quoted by the company comScore Inc are wholly inaccurate and in no way reflect definitive market intelligence or, indeed, the true success of the project.”

If by “accurate” they mean “exactly correct”, then I agree. However, comScore is being quite open about their methodology and their approach seems sound to me. Good statisticians can be surprisingly accurate, and the band’s unwillingness to publish the statistics themselves don’t inspire me with confidence that comScore is “wholly inaccurate”. Just how far off does one need to be to count as “wholly inaccurate”, anyway? So, needless to say, I don’t know, but if I had to bet, I’d bet that comScore’s data are not far off the mark (I’ll say +- 5%).

Wired’s blog post on the matter seems to miss the “significant percentage of visitors” part of comScore’s report and thus estimates with faulty reasoning that the band netted $2.7 million from the stunt. Without knowing just what this “significant percentage” is, even approximately, then I do think it’s fair to say that estimates of the total are “purely speculative”. However, I’ll go out on a limb and bet that the band netted over $1 million in the first month of the ordeal. I’ll also stand by my previous prediction that over the course of their experiment they will serve up over a million downloads and gross 2-5 million dollars. That, of course, was and is wild speculation. But comScores numbers are similar. A small but very well-known group of people have access to the real answers, and I challenge them to go public with them. But, they know everyone wants to know, and I suspect they like the attention of keeping the secret. It’s certainly their right to do so, but I think it’s kind of lame.

So, last night was the night! And, I gotta say, I think it was a good idea on their part. While we certainly aren’t polished for presentation (contradancing is for dancing, not for watching) people definitely seemed interested and we had quite a crowd gathered around us (including from the balcony that encircled the space we were dancing in). I didn’t have my camera :( but Beth did so I’m hoping to get some pictures from her. Tom and Fred played a great selection of music for this event, and Priscilla and John (who both drove up with me from Bloomington) and all the other dancers did great.

The concert was also very nice. This Boris Giltburg fellow is really good, and it had been a while since I wrapped myself up in the world of professional orchestra performers like that. This turned out to be highly intensified by having John along, because he’s studying to be one (a trumpeter, no less) and had plenty of opinions and gossip to share about this unusual professional culture. Anyway, good concert, I especially liked the Shostakovich.

And… it was fun to be in Indy right before their long-awaited first appearance in the Superbowl. The city is really excited. Actually, I didn’t see a lot of riotous behavior or anything, people in Indianapolis are pretty mild mannered. But what was so striking is that EVERYWHERE had some “Go Colts” type stuff up. Seriously, as we walked the two blocks from the car to the concert hall, I’m not sure there was a single store front that didn’t have something Colts related in the window. Certainly there was no view of anything downtown without several Colts logos in them. And it was topped off by the orchestra projecting a Colts logo on the wall behind them during the warmup periods and the intermission (they turned it off while they were performing). Classy!

And, well, I’m with them! I don’t think I’ve ever cared as much who won the SuperBowl as I do this year. The Colts are a great team… highly skilled, smart, and nice! And, of course, the regional allegiance plays high. So, looking forward to the game tonight! Go Horse!! :)

So, after a flurry of work, I’m now on the road. I’m sitting in a cafe in Urbana Illinois, where in a little over an hour I will be the caller at their regular bi-weekly contra dance. I got here an hour and a half early, which was kind of on purpose. Somehow, I just couldn’t convince myself that if I left Bloomington at 6pm (EST) I’d still be in Urbana by 7:30 (CST) comfortably early for their dance. But, try it was, and now I’m kind of wishing that I had made that one last Xmas shopping trip before I left.

But really, it’s good. I feel under control, relaxed, and able to do something fun like write a blog entry instead of worrying about being on time. And, it really feels like I’m on tour/vacation, sitting in an unfamiliar cafe and wondering if they have free wifi Internet access here. I can’t see where they do, and even if they did, I would think twice about trying to get it working. I don’t have that much time, and those free wireless things aren’t always very friendly to Linux users. So, I’m doing the “type now, post later” thing. And yes, I won’t be able to post this until after the tour is over. Because, you see, after Urbana tonight, I’m off to E. Lansing, Michigan tomorrow night to call the dance there. And then, Sunday, I’ll head to Cleveland to stay with my parents. And, as soon as I get my Mom’s Xmas Internet access working, this will magically appear on my blog.

Oh, and don’t worry, Mom knows about this gift, so I’m not spilling any beans. :)

Tuesday night, I called the dance in Indianapolis.

Wednesday night, I thought I’d get to actually dance. And, technically, I did, but only one dance.

The first Wednesday of the month is always open mic night at the [Bloomington contradance](http://www.bloomington.in.us/~botmdg/), and we frequently don’t have very many callers. But we usually have plenty of musicians. As I exited my car (being unusually punctual for the dance) I thought “maybe I should have brought my banjo… Oh, there’ve been plenty of musicians at open mic nights lately, and besides, you want to dance.”

Foreshadowing…

I saw a caller signup sheet when I showed up, and it said that Patsy was going to call (which, I correctly guessed, was her first time calling at open mic. Great!). Bill and Bob were both signed up too, leaving only one open slot. “Cool! I might be able to dance the whole time”..

Yeah….

I did dance the first dance with Cisa. Patsy did a great job calling. The music was great… But it was pretty much only John playing his fiddle. I felt for him. Plus there were too many male dancers. Plus there was a beautiful guitar (a Silvertone f-hole, kind of like [this](http://www.ratemyaxe.com/details.php?image_id=136)), sitting on the stage. Instead of dancing the second dance, I went up on stage and asked John if he knew whose guitar that was. “Yours!” he said. It was his actually, but he brought it in case he found himself playing fiddle alone and there just happened to be someone who knew how to play the guitar but who didn’t bring one to the dance.

Oh, I guess that would be me!

So, for the 2nd-8th dances of the evening, I played guitar. Wow. So, I used to play the guitar a lot in high school, and I still “get it”. But, I’m out of shape and tend to find my hands getting tired when I play the guitar vs. the banjo these days… plus, I never have really played old-time guitar. I’ve often marvelled at how those old time guitarists can keep up that “boom-chang” so steadily and for so long.

I’m still marvelling…

Yeah, wow, I felt very exposed, and very underprepared for playing the guitar for a contra dance. A thought I had was “[compared with other instruments] it’s easy to know what to do, but it’s very difficult to do it… or at least to do it well”. I’m hoping that I helped to round out the sound of the band, but from where I sat, I was not at all certain that I was.

I actually felt like I got better at it as the evening wore on. I joked to John afterwards that it was a bit like an intensive work session on old time guitar. I just had to **keep playing**. After a while I noticed that the middle finger of my left hand was tingling. I said “I think I’m doing nerve damage to my finger…. Oh wait, it’s just a blister.” It was just a blister. Then a song or two later, the blister popped, which I realized because there was only one possible source for the droplets of clear liquid that had suddenly appeared on my fingers. It’s remarkable how much more pressure is applied to ones fingers on the guitar vs. the banjo.

But, actually, it didn’t hurt much. And, really, it was my right (strumming) hand where I felt like I was really getting the lesson. The chords I was playing were all simple standard stuff, and although I made plenty of mistakes, fingering the chords for old time music is not that hard. But, keeping your right hand going with the “boom-changs”, being creative with the “Booms” and still getting a clear ring on the “changs”… it ain’t easy. My hat’s off to all of you old time guitarists that make us melody instruments sound so good.

In any event, no one asked me to leave, so I at least played that well. And had a good time at Max’s place afterwards. So, good…

Glenn Augenstein called an entire program of dances by Gene at the [contra dance in Louisville](http://www.louisvillecontradancers.org) on Monday night, and I decided to follow his lead and the suggestion of my friend and do the same last night. It’s caused a good deal reflection for me about everything from what makes Gene’s dances so good to how the great people in the American contra dance community have contributed to the joy of others. Gene was a member of a very small group of contra dancers about whom I am prone to use the word “legendary”. The fact that he is gone at age 51 is a tragedy. At the same time, his dances are likely to be part of my life for as long as I continue to live.

Thank you, Gene. On behalf of all of us.

Coincidentally, tonight at the [Buskirk-Chumley Theater](http://www.buskirkchumley.org/), [Andrew Bird](http://www.andrewbird.net/) is headlining a sold out show. I was introduced to Mr. Bird’s music when he opened for Ani DiFranco at a show I saw a couple of years ago. I did not hear
[the interview with him on Weekend Edition Sunday](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4469859) about a year ago. Apparently Scott Simon didn’t either, because if he had, he probably wouldn’t have been at such a loss as to how Ms.
Tunstall did what she did.

I’m sure I have an advantage over Scott Simon on understanding this. I’m a musician, and I’ve played with electronic gadgetry of the general sort that these musicians use to build their layered sound. And, perhaps because of that, when I hear these types of performances, I come away more impressed with the electronics than with the performers. This is a shame, because both of these musicians impressed me with their (traditional) musical abilities. Mr. Bird plays his violin very well, and his whistling is remarkable to say the least. Ms. Tunstall’s voice is so lovely that I didn’t even mind her joke about Ella Fitzgerald being her voice teacher. But, yeah, when either of them get into that layered-loop effect, I find that the music suffers.

It’s an amazing technology. We’ve all got to wowed when we first hear it, and I’m no exception to that. But for me, that first hearing was years ago. I’m not wowed anymore. What I find now is that I think about how they build these soundscapes, and the limits that the technology places on them. They always have to build the sound one layer at a time. If they want harmony, they have to first sing or play one line, then the next, etc. Then, once the layers are going, their options are to keep repeating or to stop repeating, at least for a while. I believe I noticed instances in both of their music where a loop dropped out for a while, and then came back. Again, it’s great that their gadgets have that ability. But even with it, I find that the implications of this approach to making music are very limiting, with the result being that no matter how different two artists may be, if they use this layered-loop approach, the results ends up sounding kind of similar.

I’m not a musical Luddite. Nor am I opposed to lots of repetition in music. Music like [Steve Reich](http://www.stevereich.com/)’s *Come Out* fill me with awe. But in that case, Reich is specifically focusing on electronics and repetition, and listening to it we find that we learn fascinating things about sound that we’d never dreamt of before. Mr. Bird and Ms. Tunstall, in contrast, seem to trying to build a sound that makes it sound like they are magically creating a band all by themselves. If either of them led a large band, the sound of the band would probably be a fair amount like they layered-loop sound that they make by themselve. But, if they actually had the bands, their hands would not be tied when they were writing the songs, and I’d rather hear it that way.

Of course, in a world glutted with highly talented musicians, if they took that approach, would they reach even the level of fame that they have? Would I bother writing a blog post about them? Would I even give them a second thought if I heard them? Likely not. So, there’s a publicity component that also cannot be denied.

It’s all so complex. But, what it comes down to for me is that my favorite of the songs that Ms. Tunstall performed on the radio was the one where she just sang and played the guitar.

Anyway, today, while I was eating lunch, I was singing it in my head, and realized that I didn’t know all of the lyrics, so I figured I’d check the web. Naturally, I had no problem finding [the lyrics](http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/The-Cinema-Show-lyrics-Genesis/1A1D2CB5E64C53C74825696000138A73). I had most of them, including “take a little trip back with Father Tiresias”. But the key line I was looking for was the following statement, being attributed to Tiresias:

I have crossed between the poles, for me there’s no mystery.
Once a man, like the sea I raged,
Once a woman, like the earth I gave.
But there is in fact more earth than sea.

Yeah, ok, what the hell? The real words I was missing were “I raged” and “I gave”. But, learning the words didn’t really satisfy my curiosity.

Well, thanks again to the World Wide Web, I also had no problem finding out [more about Tiresias](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiresias). I certainly recognized the name, I’m sure I knew it from studying mythology in high school. I probably would have been able to remember/guess that he was a prophet. But I certainly didn’t know that he had spent time as both a man and a woman, and lost his sight by agreeing with Zeus that sex was more pleasurable for a woman than for a man. Hera, who learned with this information that she had lost a bet with her esteemed husband, struck Tiresias blind.

So… woah. This song is apparently a poem about sex being better for women than it is for men…. with an apparent comment that it’s because women are “giving” where as men are “raging”. This has really changed my understanding of the song, to say the least. I wonder when, if ever, I’ll be able to hear/think about the song without having to wonder if sex is a matter of “raging” for me as a man (I’ve certainly never thought of it that way), or whether being “giving” in sex brings one more joy. Or whether it was that way for Zeus and Hera. Or whether it’s fair to say that earth “gives” while an ocean “rages”. Or…

The inspiration to blog about this was not because of these particular questions. Rather, it was because I was struck again by how interesting it is when one’s understanding of a song can change suddenly when one learns the actual lyrics. Much has been made of the misunderstanding of song lyrics, but in this case, I didn’t have any of the lyrics wrong, I just knew I didn’t exactly know all of the words. I was really close, but just a few holes in my understanding, combined with an incomplete knowledge of the mythical character involved, made me pretty much not get the point of the lyrics, even though I’ve known the song (minus a few words) quite well for about 20 years.

OK, that’s not all that deep either, but what do you want? It’s just a short post to a blog!

After a lot of discussion about who all might be joining me on the trip, it turned out to be just Matece and I. It was very nice to have company, we had some great conversations along the way. It was nice to spend some “QT”, as she called it, noting that we really never had before. So good.

The dance itself was fun. It’s in this remarkable place… the town is surrounded by farms, and it exists seemingly for the sole purpose of giving farmers a good place to load their crops onto trains. So, the main fixture of the town is a grain elevator next to railroad track. Near that is what’s called the “town hall” although it seems more a community center than a center of politics. I don’t know. Anyway, it has a beautiful dance floor in it, not very big but lovely. There’s a decent stage on one side of the square dance hall, and balconies around the other three sides. Very nice.

One quirk, about which I had been warned: the floor slopes. It’s imperceptable if you’re just on it, but… wow, it makes the dance line move! A line will start in the center of the hall and around half way through the tune it will have drifted all the way to one of the walls. Fascinating phenomenon, and it repeated on almost every dance of the whole night. :)

Calling was fun. My role as host was a bit confusing… since the dance was scheduled from 8p to 2a, they don’t expect one person to call the whole time. That’s wise. What they do then is have volunteer calling as well. That’s not a bad idea, but it wasn’t very structured, and what I found is that I didn’t make as much of a connection with the dancers as I normally do when I’m the hired caller. But, hey, it meant that I could dance! So, I did a mix of calling and dancing, and some of the other callers there were very good, so it worked out just fine. The music was good. People had fun. I guess the only thing that would have made it a lot better would have been more dancers. Ah, well. It was still fun.

Well, almost everyone…

Before I get into it, let me start out with a strong disclaimer.
Although I’m about to say some negative things about the festival, I
generally think of it as a good thing. I’m not trying to convince
anyone not to enjoy it. If you have a great time at it, I’m happy for
you. I have a good time sometimes, and I’ve had some valuable musical
experiences. So, I’m glad for it. But, the deal is, I generally
don’t have very much fun at the event, and I even struggle to enjoy
the music. So, this is a bit about my personal issues with Lotus.

To try to put it briefly, I’ll offer this analogy: imagine you were
attending a special dinner prepared by a number of excellent chefs
from around the world. You go to the event and what you eat turns out
to be: Three tortilla chips with mango salsa; one ravioli with saffron
cream sauce; one shrimp/daikon egg roll; A cup of borsht; and a nice
large bite of calamari. Furthermore, imagine that of that list, the
only thing you’d ever eaten before was ravioli, and that was with
plain tomato sauce. All the rest of them are cuisines that are almost,
if not totally, unfamiliar to you.

To me, although such an experience might fill my belly, it’d be very
hard for me to think of it as a meal. Sure, being exposed to
different things is an experience that I value. But when the morsels
are so small, it’s folly to think that you actually learned anything
about the cuisines you were being exposed to. Maybe you can get
enough of a taste to know that you’d like to learn more about it, but
I’d say that’s about as high as your hopes could reasonably be set.

Perhaps it’s because I like learning. If you offer to teach me
something about Ethiopian folk music, I want to actually learn
something and not just pass through a room where an Ethiopian happens
to be playing on an instrument unfamiliar to me.

Perhaps it’s because of my training in classical music, where sitting
still for 2+ hours and just listening is considered a normal way to
appreciate music. Come to think of it, it’s probably a small
percentage of my socio-economic class that has this experience even
once a year.

I don’t know. All I know is that the event, by and large, doesn’t
really make sense to me as an event.

Used to be I’d go with friends and debate here and there about what
we’d see. All sorts of conversations like “hey, and while we’re on
our way to the folk singer from Belarus, we can stop by and see what
this Cajun thing is like.” This “one bite of everything” approach
definitely left me confused, so eventually I decided I needed to be in
control of my own schedule.

So, this year I told myself “just pick a few items that sound
interesting, and go to those shows in their entirety”. So, I
deliberately avoided sharing the event with any of my friends–and,
seemingly all of my local friends (and a number from out of town) are
at this event, so that can take some work. Avoiding friends, though,
has the added benefit of making me feel like less of a downer. As Rob
pointed out, part of my problem with the event is probably just that
all my friends are running into me and saying “Wow! Isn’t this
AWESOME? Aren’t you EXCITED??!?” What do you say if it’s not true
about yourself? He’s definitely got a point.

Whatever the case, I went to the event with this strategy in mind. My
first goal is to see “Lura”, singing Cape Verdean Song. I didn’t know
where Cape Verde is (I’m sure very few in the audience did either),
but the description in the guide sounds good. However, I get there,
and there’s a long line outside the theater… I’m not good with
lines, I’m afraid, so I change plans and head towards the bluegrass
band King Wilkie. They are fine, fun, young guys playing old music.
It’s fine.

I try to sit and enjoy it. I enjoy it ok. But it seems to take a lot
of effort.

Q: How can you tell when you’re at a Lotus concert?

A: After every song, about a quarter of the audience leaves.

They stand up clapping
at the end of the song, and sometimes you even think “wow, they liked
that so much that they are giving an ovation!” No. They are thinking
about what they are on their way to.

The apparent leader of the Bluegrass band commented on this a few
times. He turned it into a joke, saying “well we’re going to slow it
down now, so that’ll probably get rid of a few more of you.” It was
funny, but I feel quite confident that his comments were based on a
real sense of disappointment. How would you feel if you looked out
into the applauding audience and saw that a substantial percentage of
the crowd was leaving? Even though you know that this is a festival
and they are just trying to take in some other music, how could it not
strike you as disappointing that your music isn’t enough to make
people want to stay?

And, even if you can cope with the disappointment, there’s still the
issue of how you put on a show for a crowd like this. Musicians put a
fair amount of care into crafting their set lists, what song to play
when, to give some shape to their overall performance. Needless to
say, that effort is wasted on at least half of everyone who is going
to hear your band at Lotus.

Finally, musicians talk a good deal about “connecting with the
audience”. Indeed, I’ve heard many interviews with long-time
performers who say that this feeling of connection is the only thing
that makes them feel like they can keep playing show after show, year
after year. Again, it’s gotta be difficult if your audience is
turning over like that.

So, having perused the reasons musicians might not like playing at
Lotus, I’ll continue with my story. Eventually I decided I wasn’t
haven’t *enough* fun, and became one of the people who left in between
songs. I went from the Convention Center to a bar (the Bluebird) to
hear Samarabalouf, from France, “channel the spirit of Gypsy guitarist
Django Reinhardt”. I got to the bar, I got a beer, I tried to get
close enough to the stage to see. I couldn’t. The band sounded good,
I guess. But I couldn’t get into it. I was probably too grumpy
already. I left after I finished my beer. At least the coming and
going seems much more natural in a bar than at a venue with seating.

Coaching myself to stick with my strategy, I went to the First
Christian Church to hear a woman named Badi Assad play Brazilian
Acoustic Music. I did stick with my strategy. I arrived before she
took the stage. I watched the entire thing. She is a remarkable
player. Some of what she did was too saccharin for my tastes,
but… yeah, excellent skill on the guitar, and did some amazing
“vocal percussion” things, including the humming while beat-boxing
trick that my brother and I learned to do from friends in Jr. High.
Oh, she was far better at it than we ever were, though. Quite
impressive.

But she really won me over when she started introducing a song by
saying “You all have heard of the prepared piano…” I think I laughed
out loud… Or maybe I offered a hoot of approval… Whatever,
that’s a pretty big assumption to make that everyone in your audience
has heard of a prepared piano, unless it’s a concert of 20th century “classical” music (and even then…) “…but I am not a pianist, so I want to
play you this song on a prepared guitar.” Her prepared guitar was
still essentially a melodic instrument (unlike a prepared piano which
mostly, imho, becomes a rhythmic percussion instrument), but she
certainly achieved unusual timbres from it, and her melody line
focused on bent notes spanning a few steps, like a steel guitar or
something. And as much as this might seem gimmicky, it didn’t come
off that way to me. Very tasteful, very honest sounding, like we were
hearing the thoughtful experientation of a full-time musician. Which,
of course, we were.

She ended with an extremely impressive bit that gave new meaning to
“mouth percussion” because she hit her head, face, and chest to give
life to an unpitched presentation that put most drum solos I’ve heard
to shame. All of this, when her guitar playing is so good that if she
did nothing but play the guitar, you would still consider her a world
class musician. An amazing performer. I was pleased.

She, by the way, also bemoaned the departure of such large parts of
the audience after every song. She seemed to be consoling herself
outloud, in nice words “this is such an exciting festival, with so
many things to do.” She did eventually joke about how it was like
musical chairs. Kind of funny.

Later I talked with some of my friends about her performance. One
friend mocked her sickeningly sweet vocals. Another friend said that
she heard nothing but guitar solos. This makes very apparently what I
think is inherent in every coming/going at a concert like this: faced
with only five minutes of something, our natural human tendency to
make sense out of things encourages us to simply summarize what we’ve
seen and assume by extrapolation that the other 70 minutes would have
been about the same as the 5 that we saw.

Perhaps it’s because I’m a musician myself that I put myself so in the
musicians’ shoes on this — and really, that doesn’t explain it,
because it does seem like most of the musicians love to play at the
festival — but I’m bothered by the idea that these people devote
their lives to a certain musical exploration… a certain style, or
merging of styles… they belong to cultures that have cultivated one
or most musical styles over the course of generations… and, because
of the nature of the event, we, the attendees, are naturally tempted
to believe that we *understand* something about what we are exposed to
based on a ten minute listen. If there’s anything that I actually see
as a negative social force about Lotus it’s this, and it applies even
moreso to “World Music” as a genre: While being aware of the breadth
of musical traditions in the world is a goal I absolutely support,
believing that you have gained awareness of the *depth* of another
culture’s music through a brief exposure is possibly more culturally
insensitive than not being aware of the tradition in the first place.

In any event, Badi Assad finished her show, to very warm applause. I
decided I’d run back to the bar to drink another beer and see what
Balkan Beat Box was like to decide if I would make time to see them
the following night. Wow, they weren’t what I expected: loud,
electronic dance music, with south-eastern European melodic material.
They were working the crowd into a dancing frenzy, and you gotta like
that. I couldn’t get into the dance scene here very well, almost
certainly because I knew I was headed back to the church for another
sit-down concert. But clearly the band and the audience were feeling
a strong sense of connection. That’s cool. I finished my beer and
headed back.

The last show of my evening was Jake Shimabukuro, I had heard called
“the Jimi Hendrix of the Ukulele.” It was very easy for me to relate
to Jake. I suspect the main reason for that is that he is like me: a
young American dork who grew up listening to classic rock, but who
likes listening to lots of other stuff too. Granted, he’s from Hawaii
and is of Japanese descent, but… I know a fellow dork when I meet
one.

Jake is a phenomenal player. I think the comparison to Jimi
Hendrix is a bit misleading, but he certainly redefined my
expectations of what could be done musically with a ukulele (which, by
the way, was the first string instrument I learned to play). But,
unlike the virtuoso who preceded him on that stage (who, by the way,
he lauded in verbose dorky language before he started playing) this
virtuoso felt like someone I was friends with. Certainly part of that
was his personality, but I honestly do think there’s something to the
notion that it’s easier to relate to people from one’s own culture.
Shouldn’t it be?

So, I was glad to see Jake. Some other shows were still going, and I
could have caught the tail end of one of them. But I didn’t feel like
it. I went home. In retrospect, I wonder why I would think that I
might want to hear more music in an evening than 2 hours of
virtuosic solo string playing by two amazing but highly contrasting
performers. Isn’t that enough?

For me, it is. I’m sure it would be for many happy Lotus attendees.
But, clearly, many people are getting something out of this experience
that I’m not getting. Some friends of mine just want to go to
whatever they can dance to. Some friends just like the feeling that
all sorts of music is going on all around them. There’s some feeling
that people like the collage effect of having all this stuff mixed
together in the evening. I like collages, but I can’t get over the
feeling that this collage is being made by a local committee out of
the torn canvas of oil paintings by artists from around the world who
weren’t thinking of their work as a part of a collage. Or, to use a
different metaphor, I’m so interested in the beauty of the trees that
it pains me to focus on the forest. In this case, the trees are
created by artists whose work I want to learn about, but the forest is
glommed together somewhat haphazardly, to make an event that seems
disturbingly unnatural to me.