Cognitive Dissonance

Elizabeth Wurtzel went to law school and has now penned a frightening op-ed for the Wall Street Journal .

It’s good to be reminded that no life is over till it’s over. Call no man happy until he is dead, indeed.

4 Replies to “Cognitive Dissonance”

  1. Laura, not to be intentionally dense here but could you possibly spell out a bit of what you thought about this article?

    I found it highly laughable in so many ways.

    “In the era of the online music store — even if you buy from iTunes rather than stealing from LimeWire, the problem is the same — no one knows how to listen to a complete album anymore.”

    Excuse me, Miss Wurtzel, I do. I frequently get laughed at for the way my iTunes library and iPod is arranged by album, which is generally how I listen to them. I still own around a 1000 CDs and buy more. I’ve bought 10 songs off of iTunes, because someone gave me a $10 gift certificate which took me 9 months or so to use.

    As far as I’m concerned, Hollywood can die its well overdue death. For pure craptastic entertainment they put out a decent movie or 3 a year but for actual content worth my time give me an indie or foreign film any time.

    As for quality music–poets even still exist–it is easily found via various means, usually involving friends with discriminating tastes and/or going to local shows.

    Yes, if Miss Wurtzel expects to find large amounts of quality on the commercial airwaves and in commercial theater chains then she is likely to be disappointed. Then again, if she does expect this it leads me to seriously question her analytic abilities and her qualifications to be a lawyer.

    It is well past time America found something better to export!

  2. My apologies for my obtuseness. I’m with you completely on the article (hell, I still own and listen to LPs!). Mostly I was just weirded out by Wurtzel’s career trajectory: spokesperson for the young and depressed, cocaine addict, lawyer who writes reactionary pieces for the WSJ.

  3. No, obtuseness is perfectly OK; I even practice it intentionally on occasion. I am a cataloger, after all. 😉

    I figured that was your take and your point but I didn’t want to be attributing any views to you that you don’t hold.

    Thanks.

  4. Different Mark here, Laura. In my previous life as a musician, I bounced around between genres, mostly jazz, classical and, er, “power pop,” and found I was a heretic among the rock’n’rollers for being perfectly willing to be satisfied with a comfortable middle-class existence as a musician, were I ever to be so rewarded.

    Especially in popular music, there are no minor leagues; you’re either desperately poor and living out of a van or you’re set for life — and that promise of big money goes a long way toward ensuring there’s very little in the way of thriving local music communities that can provide incomes, nurture developing artists, and compete with corporate products. (It’s not Wurtzel, it was *me* who saw the best musicians of my generation destroyed by madness.)

    It’s a shame we have to take people like her and the new overseer at the WSJ seriously, but hopefully the fact that they’re so shrill and ridiculous means they know they’re dying along with corporate entertainment. And who knows what sort of phoenix might rise out o’ *that* happy funeral pyre.

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