On 11 Apr 2007 at 16:12, Andrew Stiller wrote: > On Apr 11, 2007, at 3:49 PM, David W. Fenton wrote: > > > Are you saying that music is an assault on your person like the > > unrequested window washing is an assault on your car? > > It can be. Suppose you were mentally rehearsing an important > presentation as you moved thru the subway. Suppose, alternatively, > that Bell just showed up at your front door? During dinner? Would he > even have been give the opportunity to raise his bow? Should he have? > > We just had a long thread on this list RE the supposed destructive > characteristics of unwanted music.
Yes, I am sometimes annoyed by the musicians who parade through the subway cars and disturb my thoughts. But just as often I'm delighted by something I wouldn't otherwise have heard. In a pass-through area of a subway station (as opposed to a subway platform or inside a subway car), you don't have a captive audience. You have people passing through briefly, who can easily avoid the unwanted music except for the few seconds it takes to move out of earshot. But, yes, it can be something of a problem in the other environments, with the more captive audience. But, as I said, I am delighted by what I hear just as often as I'm annoyed. > As for "assault on your car," that is arguable only if 1) your > windshield really didn't need cleaning and 2) if the squeegee guy was > not doing a good job. Would I reject such overtures even so? You bet. Uh, you obviously do *not* know the history of the sqeegee men in NYC and Rudolph Giuliani. A handful of them did a lot more than politely request money after washing your window. > Do I walk right past most buskers? You bet. I thought the sqeegee example was raised with reference to the actual NYC history, as it became something of a high profile symbol of the putative cleanup of NYC that Giuliani claims all responsibility for. It's coming up in political discussion of his presidential candidacy, on one side as an example of his authoritarian tendencies, and on the other as an example of his take-charge/get-things-done/clean-up-the- undesirables history. > > And, of course, that whole squeegee thing was a vast exaggeration by > > Giuliani and his ilk -- there were never more than a few dozen of > > these characters to begin with. > > I doubt that Giuliani ever had the slightest hint of the squeegee > situation in Philadelphia: few in number, but positioned at crucial > intersections. > > The whole world is not NYC, you know. But the citation of sqeegee men, I thought, was an intentional reference to that particularly egregious example of misbehavior on the part of a few "beggars" along with vast overreaction by an authoritarian neo-Fascist mayor. Perhaps I was wrong to read that into the citation of it, but otherwise, I can't see how it compares at all to buskers, who are really quite different from either type of squeegee guy. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
