Category: music

Discussion About Setting Up My Music On a New Laptop and Questions About I-tunes

My chromebook was on its last legs, so I just got a new laptop. Moving and organizing my music on the new computer has been a top priority and a huge task. Currently, I have a subscription to Apple Music, and I’ve used i-tunes to play music–music files I ripped from CDs prior to subscribing to Apple Music. While Apple Music’s library is very large and meets most of my needs, Apple Music doesn’t have all the music/musicians I like, and I have some of those on CDs. Because of this, I still utilized my laptop (and an older ipod) to listen to this music.

Here are some questions that I have and would be interested in some feedback:

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Portland, Oregon 2025

Leaving the Portland airport, seeing the architecture of the homes and evergreen trees made me feel like I was back in Seattle. But as we drove into downtown Portland, two things stood out, distinguishing Portland from Seattle–namely, the Willamette River and the bridges, one after the other, a few rising high above it. Water features prominently in Seattle, but the water there is like an amoeba surrounding it, whereas in Portland, the Willamette is a strong line, cleaving the city in two, creating western and eastern sections. The Western side is more of the urban core, including the downtown area. The Eastern side is more suburban, with several portions of the longer streets and avenues filled with shops, restaurants and even movie theaters, creating a kind of charming main street vibe. I really like Seattle, but I might like Portland even more. The food scene seems just as good as Seattle, if not better, and they have probably the best bookstore I’ve been to. I want to talk about that store and also a used vinyl/cd/video store which I really liked as well.

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Thoughts on Taste

Reading Criterion.com’s Trash and Treasure at the Razies, I came across the following quote, which I liked:

People “distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make,” writes sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction: “between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar”—between art and trash. “Art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfill a social function of legitimating social differences.” We reveal ourselves through our preferences; like a space telescope photographing faraway light from the beginning of the universe, our esteem for a particular film is a lens that sees backward in time, to the economic class, educational history, and subcultural sensibility in which such preferences are forged. You are what you like—and, crucially, you aren’t what you don’t. To prefer this to that is to align yourself with these people instead of those, an assertion of in-group belonging through a common agreement about what tastes are unpalatable. Per Bourdieu, “all determination is negation; and tastes are perhaps first and foremost distastes, disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance.”

As a reaction to the quote, I want to explore some of the following questions in this thread:

  • What is taste (art, etc.)?
  • What is good taste?
  • Is having good taste important?

An Alternate Approach to Best of the Year Lists

As I see the best of the year lists popping up, I once again think about another approach I wish critics would employ–namely, instead of identifying the best works relative to other works within a given year, identify the works in a given year that compare favorably with the all-time great works. One drawback here is that none of the works may meet this criterion. For me, I don’t see this as a drawback. Here’s the reason why (and this will explain my overall mindset with regard to this topic).

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