| Almost the entire point of dance music is the elevation of the present moment beyond all else. (This is obviously an assertion meriting careful & even aggressive interrogation, yet couldst thou not tarry with me one hour here, sweetcakes? K THX BYE) Whether this quality – I usually call it "immediacy" – is party to its own cause or simply a happy after-effect of other things, who can say? It seems fair, anyhow, to say that the dance record exists chiefly for the maximum pleasure of the person dancing, who dances at least partly in response to the dance record, which exists for the person who is dancing in response to the record which plays for the pleasure of the dancer who dances, etc. etc. |  |
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I started writing this week's piece while preparing dinner and listening, yet again, to Last Exit, the astonishing new album by the Junior Boys. Such circumstances led to a title for the piece, which title seemed at one point so apt for the thoughts I was having that I stopped what I was doing and wrote it down. I look at the piece of paper on which I scribbled that title now, and I wonder: what on earth might I have meant? I must have thought it was something pretty good, because I wrote it in my most legible cursive. "Engaging with the moment vs. the man cutting onions" is what it says here on my notes-about-the-Junior-Boys three-by-five slip. |
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