|||

promoting ideas

I’m reading A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary1 and it’s full of delicate treasures and everyday written doodles. It’s also creating the dangerous possibility that every blog post of mine from here until then will simply be a quote from the 1995 version of Brian Eno. This is awkward, but fuck it.

Here, Eno is discussing payment for doing an interview and expressing bemusement that as the primary producer (i.e. the interviewee) he should be paid, and that It’s good promotion for you” is not good enough:

This is why I’ve never particularly linked doing interviews to record releases — which most people do. I’m not promoting the record: the records are promoting the ideas.

I like Eno’s sleight of mind here.

I make dances, and I help others make dances, and I go to watch dances (in many different forms) because they are in some way promoting ideas (even if those ideas exist in a purely kinaesthetic way).

Currently dance seems to be preoccupied with promoting dances rather than allowing the dances to promote ideas. This also often gets in the way of the works themselves. To put the cart before the horse is a trap in our time of dance trailers, social web, e-news and hyper-connectivity.


  1. Eno, Brian (1996). A Year With Swollen Appendices. London: Faber and Faber, p.43. Amazon link↩︎

Up next working at speed Below is a quote from musician Thom Yorke in an interview he did with NPR’s Bob Boilen in February 2008. It comes in at 9:40min into the interview. blind spots … when you’re researching in media res, the new ideas or details or stories that you stumble across are much more useful to you, because you can
Latest posts the end of nature thinking like a consumer eliminate the friction Look and Look Again astray awkwardly sign on the door ask nature ecosytemic practice research self portrait as time the comfort/chaos circle things will have to change ladder of inference physical connection berry on minimalism stimming the body isn’t a thing postcards no country your morals eating irritating in others awakened transfiguration bits of unsolicited advice stockdale paradox hands that don’t want anything singing and dancing losing oneself given a price on remembering everything Godin on ideas