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About
This Site - Postscript
"What's
It All About?"
By Doug Boilesen, 2020
Phonographia's "About This Site"
is a fairly standard "About" page.
As I was writing that page, however, I could hear Dionne Warwick singing
"What's It All About?" from the movie "Alfie"
and it triggered two thoughts: First, that even the "About"
page of Phonographia has connections. And second, those connections
should be noted.
So I created this postscript page "What's
It All About."
Phonographia.com is an on-line scrapbook
but its phonograph related themes and connections started in 1981
when I wrote a book, "Hats Off to the Phonograph!" That
book didn't get published but I still wanted to do something with
its content, especially its images which actually couldn't all fit
into a book anyway.
This website was my solution.
Much has changed since my draft 1981
book with the phenomenal growth of information and images on-line.
Museums have put more and more of their collections on-line and other
applications in social media (e.g., Pinterest in 2010) support the
saving and sharing images and ideas based on hobbies and the interests
of its users.
Bots and Artificial Intelligence will
likewise impact the collecting of these images adding astounding numbers
of examples with their search results. Nevertheless, I continue to
add my one-by-one "connections" to phonographia.com because
I enjoy finding them (or sometimes they just find me). I think I also
rationalize that phonographia's galleries are more than simply collections
of images.
Jonathan Haidt in The
Righteous Mind, explains that writers who have fascinations
with their subjects often come to believe that "the object of
their fascination is the key to understanding everything."
Here's how the social
psychologist Haidt writes about this phenomenon and how it is applicable
to his own book:
"People who
devote their lives to studying something often come to believe
that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding
everything. Books have been published in recent years on the transformative
role in human history played by cooking, mothering, war...even
salt. This is one of those books. I study moral psychology, and
I'm going to make the case that morality is the extraordinary
human capacity that made civilization possible. I don't mean to
imply that cooking, mothering, war and salt were not also necessary,
but in this book I'm going to take you on a tour of human nature
and history from the perspective of moral psychology."
Phonographia is not my key to understanding
everything nor is it about the all.
But it does offer glimpses into the
popular culture of other eras. It tells stories about the past that
are still relevant today. It takes something like the phonograph and
reminds us that not too long ago sound was ephemeral and the music
of the world could not be heard except in its own time and place.
And now we have things like Spotify and unbelievable home entertainment
opportunities.
What I personally enjoy is that since
phonograph connections and its inter-connections are everywhere they
can be found anywhere -- in a book like Willa Cather's One
of Ours, or in a movie or a cartoon.
Phonographia is an assortment of ephemera.
I have tried to organize examples into respective scrapbooks but some
are in multiple galleries because they are part of multiple themes.
The following are a few "What's
It All About" phonographia connections that make up this ad hoc
"What's it All About" gallery.
These are the part of the "just
for fun" aspects of being a Friend of the Phonograph.
Pat Metheny LP album "What's It
All About", Nonesuch Records ©2011
What's
it all about, Alfie?
The
Hokey Pokey
"do the hokey pokey" LP 33 1/3 RPM, Peter
Pan Records 8073 - 1969
"My
Records!"
Monty Python's The Meaning
of Life LP, CBS 1983
Courtesy Bill Woodman and
The New Yorker, 1992
Courtesy Pete McKee and
the Ministry of Audio Pleasure from the Thud, Crackle, Pop exhibition,
2014
Phonographia
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