Date: Sat, 08 Mar 1997 08:17:47 -0500 (EST)
From: 00acking-AT-bsuvc.bsu.edu
Subject: Re: heloo?:-)



I distrust unpacking too much, language can take you any place you want to
take it, it will always prove that one plus one is five, six, whatever.
Let me stick to the concrete. [Call this conrete theory, sub-empirical if
you wish]. Three trips to India and 18 months in India doing research and
touring resulted in some close friendships which continued for some years,
but afterwards mostly dried up as such things do. The possibility that
some of the people will be on e-mail suddenly makes contact possible
again, the kind of contact based on continual communication with a person,
shared interests, getting involved in the lives of others. 

So communications really is part of what reshapes the world. But yes, the
system of communications also partly determines what results. An African
musical group recording for a French label will find it is changing, the
rhythm and instrumentation will become more like a Francophone world beat
usable in discos. To use e-mail seems American. In France the national
system is very administrative, rational, great in theory, seldom
functions. Like dealing with a functionaire and is expensive as the
government is taking a cut, again a difference in economic ideology. In
Goa I remember hearing from other houses 1940 style American radio shows
in Indian languages. This structure had been imitated, so forms move
across cultures. But I also remember hearing tunes of the period so
Indianized that I weren't someone with strong musical interests I would
have never recognized them. They had been absorbed into popular Indian
musical languges and transformed. I think this is the point of A K
Ramanujan's poem about an Indian great house, nothing that comes in is
ever really lost, but becomes so changed that it leaves different. There
has been an unwillingness to accept this in Poco theory which has
inscribed victim-master, and this is why the theory is so often at odds
with the better artists. Cyberspace gives one a chance to look at
something else developing. Of course, it could all become regulated, sold
in packages, and in that case you are back to other problems about
capitalism, government, etc.  Enough rambling. I return to being a lurker
and learner. Bruce King



Cheers,  \(^o^)/  \(^-^)/
Bruce and Adele King
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Muncie, IN 47304, USA
Phone: 765-282-3569
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