Our Fractured Epistemology
The excitement of a Friday!
I said last week that I’d enjoyed the first episode of Star Trek : Discovery season 3. I watched episode 2 and was less taken by it. It isn’t that it was particularly poor–it had its moments, just that it was a bit Star Trek-generic and I’d hoped for better. I have a horrible feeling that Discovery is going to move away from what I enjoyed in seasons 1 and 2 and give us exceptionalism in space instead (again). I’m getting a Team America : World Police vibe; perhaps the gallant crew will save known space through the medium of Acting.
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I renewed my annual Grateful Dead archive releases subscription today: in return I’ll get at least four restored and remastered concerts over the course of 2021, starting with a show from April 1978. Since they didn’t use setlists and played what they felt like on the night, and since they made it a point of principle never to play the same song exactly the same way twice, you’re never quite sure what you’ll get.
I listened to a Yes show from 1975 a week ago. It was a good show and the band were on top form. I’d really like an official release if a good recording exists. But I also know that they will have played the same set list, more or less, throughout the tour, so any variation is down to improvisation on the night. That was never the case with the Dead. Of course sometimes they sounded horrible, but when they clicked, well.
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I didn’t watch the US Presidential debate last night; there was no point and, anyway, it was on while I was asleep. I did read an interesting piece about it on Zeynep Tufekci’s Substack pages today though. The full link is https://zeynep.substack.com/p/against-nostalgia, but this paragraph resonated:
But the format shouldn’t be a moderator giving candidates merely two minutes to recite well-rehearsed soundbites or habitual rants, followed by 30 seconds alloted to his opponent to “respond.” It’s a joke. It’s not serious. It’s so ridiculous that I don’t think I need to explain all the ways in which this doesn’t work, even with the mute button that was deployed in the last debate. Debates in this format might have made some sense in an area before cable television, before social media, before our fractured epistemology, before a president that does not even pretend to nod to a common narrative.
Yet it goes on, in front of our serious faces.
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Another 1500 words written, mostly this afternoon and this evening. yay!
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Music: tonight’s music comes from an October 1970 album I had never heard, or even heard of, until I came across it by accident a couple of weeks ago. I wrote it up elsewhere on this site, but I also bought it and had it on repeat in the shed this afternoon.
This was an additional track on the cd re-release. Demon Fuzz : Fuzz Oriental Blues
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