is this the beginning or the end of creativity ?

http://creative.com/products/product.asp?category=210&subcategory=211&product=12985#

Saleem,here is some harsh, but i hope constructive critiscm, from a reader (put yourself in my batty trainers)…

..for ****s sake if you are going to use the words and make your essays then don’t duck from it afterwards.

but then again,i do not know the difference between social sciences and humanities ,if feud was derived from feudal or the otehr way around…so maybe this readers shoes will not fit you.

i have seen from some your writeups and comments here (not salvai.com) that you lack some of the C word.

(don’t make me say it) and why did you edit my F word?

when i use it,so sparingly and if so, so Confidently.

What’s a crescendo?

Meanwhile I definitely don’t lack confidence! More absurdity. I happen to be confident in the transience of things I say: very few things are made of stone.

i think Sarmad ended this conversation quite nicely (in a cresecendo?) by asking that question again after he asked it first 12 comments ago…that subtlety was wasted (perhaps) on you ,Saleem,or was noted but which you steamrolled anyway by your confidence.

noted.

or on the flip side of the coin,or the stone,which you love to see,maybe there was no reason at all for a musicologist to ask :

what is a crescendo ?

where would you get that idea?

the personality is not upset or confused?

but readers…

this mean war.

There is no law that forces you to use a word merely because it exists. It’s clear that you derive extraordinary pleasure from throwing words around, but do you ever read yourself after wanking to an orgasm of verbosity? I have to believe you would find your language much less satisfying, perhaps even indecent, after a reviving hit of nicotine. Not to mention the day after.

Sincerely yours,

Dorian

i was only joking about a war,we are all on the same side here right neocrats? So who is this foul mouthed imposter with warped metaphors ? our Saleem has a sense of humour, where is yours ? or was that it up there?maybe this is an old boys insiders joke tho’

is Dorian Gray the girlfriend of Oscar de Cavalier?
this has to end somewhere,this cyber stuff is NOT the purpose of life,that much i know. lets all get a life.

Modernism was optimistic, and if V- was set in that period, then it would embody this optimism; a fair observation.

Regarding Sal’s verbosity, I do tend to agree with Dorian though, but then again, babbling is Sal’s forte, ups, I mean mad skillz.

Anyway, I appreciate Sina’s support, but I think it’s worth saying that everyone has been right. My original post may have had a couple good ideas - and I think Art as Search is a fun one - but it was not well written. I usually do it better.

Dorian’s comparison of my words with genital effluence was definitely over-strong, and not unique in the scheme of metaphors for bad writing.

Fin?

Regarding the specific flaws in this piece, I’m afraid I refuse to debate with a writer who doesn’t believe in his work. Neither you nor I, nor my fellow readers, would gain a thing. I’ll wait until such time as my criticism coincides with your willingness to muster a robust self-defence.

I must also point out that your general superciliousness (which I see you mistake for confidence) is more than a little misplaced when one remembers that two million years of natural selection within the genus Homo have spectacularly failed to eradicate stupidity. The ineluctable inference is that high intelligence, which I hereby tenuously equate with the ability to write, is no more worthy than high running speed or good skin tone. In other words: you are not special.

In summary, your writing can be very good, but it can also be atrocious, and it tends to the latter when you serve it with an unhealthy dollop of ego sauce.

That’s my substantive reply to your four paragraphs, because I disagree with your argument. During a recent internship, an editor told me what an editor had once told him: you write it today, tomorrow it’s lining a cat litter. Blogs are usually a grade lower than bad newspapers, and the Neocrats is no Dickensian serialised novel. It is transient, even the physics support this: it scrolls down and away into untouched webpages. A merciful grave.

But, your replies also excite me a great deal. We don’t know much about you. You write like you might know me, or you write like a proactive reader: both are fun possibilities. I think it’s the latter; I’m quite sure I don’t know you. And so the notion of a stranger engaging so thoroughly with a “writer” on this blog, having so visceral a reaction and voicing opinions so forcibly, is a new experience for the Neocrats. Your civic spirit, purist attitude and articulation are fantastic. Equally good is your readiness to tell me my failings. Please continue.

One other point: I come across as supercilious, I know, but I suppose I’m sometimes like the oil market: many barriers to entry. If I’m being good company, I truly hope that I am self-abnegating; but if I’m having fun amongst friends - which is my attitude here - you’re damn right I’m supercilious. I mean, look at you all. It’s part of the act; it’s for effect; it’s a joke.

My response to V4V was somewhat different. I was intrigued by the fear and what it said about our culture now (compared to when the original was written) that the impetus for the Norsefire rise to power was a virus, not a nuclear war. Medicine has come so far in the past decades, and yet we still fear illness. Think of how many stories there are in the media about “such and such causes cancer” and “bird flu”. People fear because viruses cannot be controlled in the same way that so much of our daily life is now controlled, because who gets a condition can be random and whilst we search for the causes the fact is that sometimes there are none.

So if I go back to my opening statement, why isn’t there more art about it?

I also liked V4V because so much was unexplained - unlike most films where any new information comes with an explanation, things like “St Mary’s” and “3 waters” were dropped in throughout the film and not explained until much later, and some details “interlink”, “DCDs” and the phones they used, were not explained at all.

I haven’t seen much modernist art apart from the Bauhaus and that was a lot about the hopefullness of design and accessibility to everyone. Modernist music on the other hand was a lot about the cleverness of the artist and audience be damned (especially the Serialists and Fluxus mvmts). “Modern” music is now something of an insult, and “modern” art even more do. But modern design is a compliment. Design is just art in the everyday, art that has a purpose. A lot of the modernist “art” was really design - civic buildings and useful objects. Modernism was also a reaction against the norm - for example the Impressionists against the Salon, and about experimention (Eliot and Joyce). At its extreme it was about rejecting tradition and ended up either descending into the surreal and absurd or fragmenting into post-modernism and my personal favourite, semiotics.

And that is a whole nother debate.

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