Miscellaneous Notes on the Daguang Festival

5,122 characters2008.11.12

Compared with the previous two years, this year’s Guanggun Festival was quite enjoyable. Of course, nothing good actually happened; it was just that I was in an especially good mood. Lately I’ve been in a very good mood all the time, and that is one of the motives behind my post soliciting a mm.

What excited me most today was receiving the new MP3 I bought a few days ago. Originally I had bought it as a birthday present to myself, but unexpectedly it still arrived a little late. Oh well, let’s count it as a festival gift~

The old MP3 of mine actually hadn’t broken, it just had a few minor problems, and the battery drained too quickly, so I hadn’t used it for a long time. The arrival of the new MP3 finally reminded me of the pleasure of listening to music while riding a bike. Compared with doing nothing but listening to music, I prefer listening while reading or writing; and compared with reading and writing, the most relaxing and enjoyable of all is listening to music on a bicycle. That is truly marvelous beyond words.

What I bought was the Newman K8+ “MP5,” 399 yuan. Its ability to play video files including Real format is meaningless to me, but the most important thing is that it supports the two lossless audio formats APE and Flac (though after trying it out, the sound quality still has problems, and some files even produce popping noises(?) ), so most of the music I drag down from VeryCD no longer needs to be converted and can be played directly on the MP3. Truly a blessing for lazy people~

In fact, I don’t care all that much about lossless versus non-lossless. Although people say that if you listen to classical music you must listen to lossless, I don’t really feel much difference. Still, in any case, being able to skip one conversion step is definitely a good thing~

As for the music I listen to, it’s now centered on classical music. But I am completely an outsider when it comes to classical music; I just download whatever catches my eye on VeryCD and listen to it. After all, there is almost nothing unlistenable in classical music. As for other music, I’ll occasionally try it when it occurs to me. Even pop songs, which I never normally listen to, don’t repel me; hearing classmates sing them in a KTV also feels pretty good. Sometimes I think that, compared with classical music, perhaps pop songs are closer to the “authentic” nature of music. Classical music is too thick with meaning and too profound; its theory and institutional forms also impose quite a few restraints, so much so that they instead obscure certain lovable and ingenuous aspects.

Different kinds of music suit different settings and moods. For me, for example, if I’m going to a KTV, then it has to be pop music. (I only listen; I don’t sing.) When going to a café or bar, I seem to prefer hearing blues, or perhaps American country music would also fit quite well. When wandering through a bookstore or shopping mall, New Age seems like a fine background. And when I simply sit down to listen to music, it wouldn’t hurt to listen to religious music, or Arabic music, Chinese folk music, rock music, and the like. As for when I am reading, writing, and thinking (as I said, except when I suffer from insomnia, I only specially set out to think about problems while riding a bike on the road), classical music is just right.

I’m adding a supplement to what I mentioned in my post soliciting mm—aII beautiful things are beautiful, and if something makes me uncomfortable, often it is not because of any flaw in the thing itself, but because I haven’t found the best way to coexist with it.

Of course, on the whole, I do have obvious preferences. Just as reading and writing occupy the proportion they do in my life, I have to admit that my tastes lean decidedly toward classical music. However, I don’t want to build much of an argument in defense of my preference—for example, saying that classical music is the real music, or that only those who love classical music count as music lovers, and then casually despising empty, restless pop music and so on. I would not say such things. If, compared with many modern people, I cannot obtain from pop songs the same degree of pleasure that they can, then that can only be regrettable, not something to be proud of.

What I want to say is that I am not some refined or elegant person; my philosophy is not graceful, let alone transcendent. Rather, it is coarse, even violent. What I pursue is independence and freedom, and never elegance. Although I am willing to style myself an “elite” or a “cultural aristocrat,” that only expresses my independence, my unwillingness to be constrained by any external norms, including distinctions between good and evil, right and wrong, elegance and vulgarity, and so on. If you think kindness, justice, and elegance are good things, then I would rather place myself on the opposite side. Of course, if you think instead that evil and vulgarity are good, then I would reject that too. In short, whichever sort of person you place me among, that is your business; I am not responsible.

How strange—how did I drift all the way here? Um, what was I originally trying to say? It seems I wanted to talk about the concept of “guanggun”… Forget it, let’s leave it at that. Just now, while writing, I was also fiddling with this MP3, trying to upgrade its firmware, but I couldn’t get it to work and ended up freezing it; only after pressing Reset did it recover. Listening to Flac music is fine, but when listening to APE there are still often small popping noises (the sort you might hear when playing music while the computer’s CPU usage is too high? What’s the technical term again?). Anyway, I’ll just make do with it.

Another gift I received on the Guanggun Festival was the heating being turned on. Mm, an already warm Guanggun Festival has unknowingly passed. I’ll stop here for now.

November 12, 2008