itrin

This Tumblr post is the first time someone has explained to me *why* I couldn’t feed them before those instances.

every single time i have had to say, "i understand that if he had food or water, he could aspirate it into his lungs under anesthesia. i am not lying to you." THEN someone would make a little note and i would stop being repeatedly asked.

not a single time was that risk explained to me. the only reason it came up was because i already knew. i still don't understand why it isn't standard pre-op counseling or pre-op check information, when me as a parent acknowledging the actual risk also put THE MEDICAL STAFF at ease because i conveyed that i had informed understanding as reason to not lie about giving my kid food.

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

X-men is always the one that comes to mind, where superpowers are a metaphor for being gay, or Jewish, or non-white, but on a diegetic level, superpowers include things like mind control and being bulletproof and blowing up things. So then you have mutant registration drawn as a parallel to the government making lists of undesirables, but what the writers have done is made imagined threat into literal threat, as the people with superpowers actually can effortlessly murder someone. That is, the false rhetoric of destruction has become literalized.

But it's always gonna have similarities though, right? Humans react to groups-of-people-that-are-not-like-them in semi-predictable ways, not always the same way, but there are commonalities. It's kind of inevietable that if you had aliens/robots/elves/mutants in your story then people would react to them in a kind of a way, and that way would *rhyme* with the way they react to existent types of people, especially if you want to be remotely interesting about it, even just on an individual psychological emotional level.

And that inevietabiltiy is something that makes it almost like... not worth criticising. Obviously if you interpret the orcs from mordor as a one-to-one substitution of Canadian people then Lord of the Rings would be a horrifically Canuckphobic piece of media, but you really don't *have* to interpret them as a one-to-one substitution!

There's a bad tendency in a lot of lefty media crit to act as though stories about aliens, robots, elves and mutants *aren't* about aliens, robots, elves and mutants, as if that's always just a thin and unimportant veneer laid over stories about real life social issues for a bit of flavour.

🩷💙 N E O N N I G H T S 💙🩷

Partners.

4'33" is not silence. It is music. And the performer is, in fact, performing.

Cage was coming up as a composer during a really interesting period in Western music history: the 1950's, a time of post-war immigration, cultural reshuffling, the re-defining of ethnomusicology. Basically, Western composers becoming exposed to an unprecedented tidal wave of different influences and perspectives.

This shift in perspective led to an intensification of the question that had been lurking in music, across many genres and practices, ever-larger with each passing year: Why?

Why is music what it is? Why does music consist of these pitches, that can only be arranged in these orders? After all, there are many different ways to create and organize pitches around the world, that are all music. Why does something become unmusical to a Western audience when it fails to follow the expected structure?

Enter aleatoric or "chance" music - composers recognizing that they had been deeply socialized into a certain way of hearing pitches, and building chance systems of generating pitch order to get around their own biases. They were stuck with whatever random pitches they generated, and then the job was to find the music in them. The 1950s also gave rise to musique concrète: using recorded sounds as musical pitches, rather than instruments playing notes.

John Cage himself was very interested in chance music - he experimented with various systems in his own compositions. But, like the pioneers of musique concrète, he wanted to take it a step further: What is the boundary between Sound and Music?

4'33" is in fact arguing that there is no such thing as true silence. You file into the concert hall, you sit with a large group of people, and you wait for the stage lights. You watch the pianist walk to the piano, and you expect "music." Instead, you're met with sound: the nervous shuffling of the guy beside you, an old woman sneezing violently into her handkerchief two rows down, maybe some annoyed muttering, and breathing, and ambient noise from the venue, and your own heartbeat in your ears.

What expectations had you already pre-built about the sounds you were about to hear, specifically because you walked into a fancy concert hall advertising a work by a known composer? Why did you sit there for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, obediently and attentively watching a pianist sit at the piano bench, even though you most likely were annoyed by the whole experience? What does this say about the silent compliance expected of audiences in fancy concert halls, and about the sorts of music we're expected to pay quiet, solemn attention to?

Sorry if it’s a little cramped- had to make this all fit in ten photos. Hope you guys like it….. and again…. sorry Andrew

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