square pizza

Even if, in the final analysis (which will not be made by us), what I think makes no sense whatsoever, and furthers no progress in understanding, nor creates greater aesthetic appreciation, I can only ask questions about why interesting things are exciting and why dull things are ignorable. If I know more about those problems, then I can hold a stick up to experience and more reliably gauge its worth; perhaps saving time and increasing quality. Efficiency and economy as elements of quality. Primarily, we need less opposable "rules of thumb" from which to make intelligible thumbnail sketches for reference to all choices that are subject to the range from "poison" to "nourishing".

Let me also say that my intentions here are to stimulate debate. It helps keep aesthetics from becoming reflexive. (I think) Socrates said: 'An unexamined life is not worth living' and following that, I say: 'unexamined tastes are not worth having'. Why do you like one thing and not another? I cannot stress the importance of this self-awareness enough.

Seriously though, from this specific to general aesthetic knowledge we can create a useful template (which I will then license to manufacture a product).

Consumers worlwide can place this product - an attractively-styled aesthetic appliance/lifestyle accessory in front of their stereos. If the music played passes through it and can be heard on the other side, it is 'ambient' (if that is the model of the appliance). If the music does not pass through, you cannot hear it. But in that case, it is not ambient, so you don't care. We will also sell replacement filter sets so the consumer can change them out as need be - especially should the filters have to work too hard and get excessively dirty screening out things like Aphex Twin or Boards of Canada.

We will also create an IDM screen, and one which works on ersatz jazz, and several others as our market research identifies areas of urgent need and strong demand.

Think of it as a HEPA filter set for music, protecting the aesthetic health and well being of music lovers everywhere through the miracles of regulation and measure. Perhaps the product's motto can be: "Protection of listener sensibility is Job One!"

All desriptions of the world have to be adjustable, but regular and fairly precise too. A difficult set of conditions to impose on a tool and its users. A crescent wrench being adjustable, is among the most useful of tools, useful even for most non-mechanics.

Pizza is a food like that - everyone knows what it is - it has recognizable and universally accepted parameters and characteristics, there is a "pizza-ness" or an "ur-pizza" that can be referred to and understood, yet at the same time it can have all manner and numbers of toppings, making it almost infinitely mutable, and a different experience for all who perceive it. Yet after all and no matter what, it is still a pizza, as everyone knows, even for its eaters and perceivers in Germany, Jonestown or Japan.

Or is it? Is a pizza really a pizza everywhere to everyone? There is the problem of square pizzas... Are they pizzas? Do they retain enough ur-pizza traits to remain pizzas? I see square pizzas as problematic as penguins for avian-ness, as problematic as using vocals with intelligible lyrics in otherwise ambient music and still calling it "ambient", and almost as problematic as describing smell and taste. Difficult to grip. Not impossible, just blurry and wobbly, hard to catch and describe.

Slippery tools are hard to use. Do you have hold of it or not? If it slips, you'll smack your knuckles! A good job is to try to clean up the tools and keep them so; they'll be more reliable and thus more useful. However, in the end, a slippery tool is better than no tool at all...

Socrates also advised that 'the only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance'