Whatever else it may be--stimulus, tranquilizer, aural nipple, too of executives, Muzak is basically trivializing. It is not simpl...y that it relegates music to the province of wallpaper. Background music never need be banal. When it is used in support of drama, it can greatly enhance without harming itself. Mozart was entirely amenable to such films as Elvira Madigan and The French Lieutenant's Woman; Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote aptly for The Invaders, Arnold Bax for Oliver Twist, Sergei Prokofiev for Lieutenant Kije and Alexander Nevsky, Dmitri Shostakovich for others. In such uses, music collaborates with artists, it becomes an art among arts. But Muzak collaborates chiefly with management: it is used as an aural smoke-screen, a form of jamming, a hormone in the henhouse, an emollient in cemeteries.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How often we must remember the art of the surgeon, which, in replacing the broken bone, contents itself with releasing the parts f...rom false position; they fly into place by the action of the muscles. On this art of nature all our arts rely.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... throughout the ages down to modern times, conditions of imprisonment, what with overcrowding, idleness, and all their attendan...t evils, have been such that not only the person but also to a deplorable extent the personality has been "confined or restrained." The problem of the betterment of our physical prison conditions goes hand in hand ... with the problem of re-creating and releasing personality "deep-dungeoned in self," of giving scope to the forces that tend upward, of counteracting and rendering harmless the already dominant tendencies toward evil.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Isn't that the problem? That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion (as it were) for... passion?... All the cosmetics names seemed obscenely obvious to me in their promises of sexual bliss. They were all firming or uplifting or invigorating. They made you tingle. Or glow. Or feel young. They were prepared with hormones or placentas or royal jelly. All the juice and joy missing in the lives of these women were to be supplied by the contents of jars and bottles. No wonder they would spend twenty dollars for an ounce of face makeup or thirty for a half-ounce of hormone cream. What price bliss? What price sexual ecstasy?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing, And like enough thou know'st thy estimate:... The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing; My bonds in thee are all determinate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »