Comments on music videos by CK MacLeod

Besides, 60 is the new 59 or something.

could be worse

fuster: good reason to be grumpy all day yesterday

beyond the Yanquis or lack thereof?

fuster: don’t quite see that the paint splashing aded much value

splashing paint is close to an end in itself... nice HD rendering of good paint splashing nice in itself... HD rendering of paint splashing on wholesomely purty girl singing nice song with splashing building in artitistical coordination with purty singing and playing is more niceitude... emergent edgy not-exactly-nice dimensionalizing resonances may or may not add interest and lend aura of significance to the video, make an argument for it as more than just a nice diversion, explain why a moldering old guy with theoretically better things to do would play it over and over and devote time to thinking about it... goes without saying that the analysis may eventually say more about the moldering old guy and his interests, and those of other moldering oldsters, than about the audio-video object itself.

yeah well here's a version without any motion picturing at all: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcZmaVvJUhA&feature=related

It's also pretty good.

The white referred to the visual element. It was an unguarded phrasing, but there warn't anything racial in it. A "black" woman in a white dress would also have been an "innocently white female" in the video... you could almost see a boy or man serving the same function, almost.

Now did you like the video?

? nah - maybe I'm not getting the joke - but the white of her dress against the white wall is central to the visual statement. The colors of her hair, skin, eyes, mouth stand out from the beginning, though are also of course, eventually drenched in paint. Her innate "color" is so fundamental that it hardly bears being referred to, but it plays a role in the symbolic drama, too.

but beyond that I'm not proceeding from the assumption that everything that evokes the pornographic, and even while objectifying a woman to a a sexually arousing effect, must be condemned. I think the video steps over into the porno-erotic, but I like the porno-erotic. I think to complete the effect, or expression, as a viewer or critic you have to move beyond the naive reception of the event just like the heroine moving beyond "tying knots in her heart" trying to hold onto the moment.

It's yer basic Kantian antinomy: From the one point of view the duality is false, from the other point of view there are two kinds of people in the world, those who think there are two kinds of people in the world...

...there is something almost crudely erotic about spraying, dolloping, and finally drenching the innocently white female with psychedelical liquid, and I won't pretend to be immune to the appeal of such imagery in its raw, conventionally pornographic form. So the whole video is a sexual coming-of-age parable, which works with the lyrical content as far as I can make it out - by the end it's a happy gang-bang, and Hannigan is transformed from virgin to porno star... in a nice way.

Some of your music postings had led me to believe that the brain-music barricades, if not entirely thrown down, had been critically breached, and that rabbles of notes were besieging the last bastions.