Opiniatrety

Linking issues.

Oh, and Happy New Year.

But you have to admit that good depressing European movies about refugee camps are almost as plentiful as, well, refugees. Now a Burt Reynolds movie about a refugee camp would really be something else. Have your people talk to my people.

It's a mellotron, dammit! And, yeah, ten years would probably be about right.

Chris? That you?

But the whole point of a Mellotron is that when you hear the flute-thingy part as played on the Mellotron, it's an ACTUAL FLUTE. Or rather, the sounds that you hear were played on an actual flute. Because admittedly nobody was playing a flute when the song was recorded, but somebody was playing a Mellotron. So is it a flute part, or a Mellotron part? If only we had a philosopher here to answer this conundrum!

Yes. I imagine you have an email address buried somewhere on your website. I'll try to drop you a line this weekend.

Isn't it a bad idea to remind people that your blog still exists in one of your own blog-posts? Kind of feels a little like preachin' to the choir...

Chris -- click my name and delete the letter 'z' (don't know why I bother, I get lots of spam anyway). Looking forward to hearing from you!

Because admittedly nobody was playing a flute when the song was recorded

Maybe, maybe not. Ian MacDonald did play real live flutes when he was part of the band (on e.g. "Cadence and Cascade".)

Wolfson, that's why I thought it was a flute. IIRC the other named interlude (digression: most of the songs on that album have names for the instrumental interludes, e.g., "The Court of the Crimson King" including "The Return of the Fire Witch" and "The Dance of the Puppets"; I long thought this was mere pretension but someone, I think Chris, told me that by having more compositions on the album they got more royalties) has live flute, but since it's been ten years I could remember wrong. There's flute on "I Talk to the Wind," though, isn't there?

Anyway, the question of whether we hear a flute is a live philosophical issue. (Or is it many flutes, if the different notes on the mellotron tapes were each played by a different flute?) I don't know much about it, but Ken/ dall Wal/ ton argues in "Transparent Pictures" when we look at a photograph we actually see, remote in time and space, the object photographed. Presumably this could be extended to recorded sound. Gareth Evans, I believe, provides arguments against this kind of view. So maybe that would mean that when we hear a recording of a flute played by a mellotron we hear a flute.

Of course if we don't hear the thing when we hear a recording of it, we don't even hear a mellotron when we hear a recording of "The Court of the Crimson King." We might also think that, in order to hear the thing in the recording, the recording must bear some fairly natural relation to the original sounds, which might be a way of arguing that we hear the mellotron but not the original flute. But this might run afoul of the use of studio trickery to put together natural-sounding recordings from a bunch of different takes. So: I don't know.

Aidan -- Sort of a reminder that the blog still exists as a living occasionally updated entry; also maybe it works as a reminder for those who have it in their RSS feeds.

I've heard the same thing about having multiple titles on the album.

Kend/ all Wal/ ton argues in "Transparent Pictures" when we look at a photograph we actually see, remote in time and space, the object photographed.

This seems, initially, so batty that I should probably read the article.

Bas van Fraassen has argued that we do not, in a strict sense, "see" through a microscope, in part because the image we are presented is something that we could never observe directly without an instrument. Ian Hacking famously criticized this position, although I think it has some worth; I can make you an image of a small part of the sky as seen by a radio telescope in New Mexico, but when you look at this, are you seeing in radio waves? That seems a dubious stretch of what it means to "see." Would it be "seeing" if I hooked up some vision goggles to my computer to project the image into your eyes? Not likely. Equating a false-color image like a radar weather map to vision would also seem to do violence to the notion of seeing.

On the other hand, when you look at a photograph, you must be seeing something. We are all familiar with the idea that some politician does or doesn't look like John F. Kennedy, but how many of us ever saw JFK (other than Matt's uncle?) In a world saturated with images of JFK, does it make sense to say that we haven't ever seen him?

So as a challenge I suggest that it is possible to make a coherent argument that you see some things represented in photographs, yet don't see other things even though the light from (a representation of) them appears to be directly entering your eyeball. I'm not going to make that argument though, because I'm an empiricist, or a mechanic: if you can't talk about it, point to it.