Actors are WAY stupider. I mean... what... they *PRETEND* to be other people for a living. What's that about?

(OK, I am only saying this because, as I have stated before, I am film deaf, so the entire acting profession seems like a bit of a nonsense to me.)

Now, are we talking about musicians / thespians that ONLY dabble in those fields? It'll get messy if we talk about musicians / songwriters / producers / label owners (or actors / screenwriters / directors / film mangates).

I think the music folk have the leg up on needing to know more technical stuff (if only because you need extra pieces of hardware to perform, where as an actor only needs a mouth and a stage), but in the multitasking portion of the competition, I'd have to give props to the acting community. The logistics of making a film (even a small-budget production) are more confounding & unwieldy than making an album.

"Musicians are the only 'creative' types who, in general, are entirely ignorant of other creative disciplines, and are in fact encouraged to be so."

Really? Do you *really* think so? Because it's always struck me as the norm for musicians to make near-obligatory passing references to authors, filmmakers, visual artists, etc. . . . Whether it is (in my personal indie-ish world) the Clientele referencing Joseph Cornell, the White Stripes naming a record after a Dutch graphic design trend, or the oh-so-widespread practice of using lines from novels in rock songs.

But even granting that you are, in certain senses, correct, there's still an explanation: popular music is currently the art form that's been brought most to the level of public lifestyle---meaning the people making much of it aren't people who make much claim to be "artists" in the general sense or to have any broad education in or appreciation of aesthetic history or critical theory. As a whole, the public seems to like the idea that bands are comprised of people who just started rocking out in a garage one day. Our poets and sculptors and playwrights, however, are expected to have bachelor's degrees at the very least.

Ooo, plus the "process" part doesn't hold up either. Authors will frequently discuss their routines for writing, their styles of editing, etc.---from the over-mythologized "I just stayed up for weeks typing, and it all flowed out" to the "I get up every morning and write five sentences, and this book took me eight years to write" to the "I decided to make this novel much more personal and autobiographical, so I kept a journal for a year, and much of the material comes from that." This is a rough equivalent to musical talk about songwriting duties, recording atmosphere, etc.---how the artist goes through the actual process of creating the art.

Their styles of editing, NOT the adaptor they used to plug the Mac in.

Musicians and writers can be self taught: you buy a record or a book, go home, play it or read it to death. Other media: not so true. Limited access — eg to marble — requires hoops to jump through to cut down the queues. Hoops = prob.totally arbitrary, but who's going to say so?

Their styles of editing, NOT the adaptor they used to plug the Mac in.

Music: the end product (ie the sound) is dependent on the equipment used (instrument, amp, effects etc.)

Writing: end product (ie the text) is the same regardless of equipment.

I've always fancied girls in bands... keyboard players and singers, specifically. They're cool, they dress smart, they're above you... but I've never had a crush on a movie or TV actress... sure, maybe I thought they were attractive or whatever, but I've never really thought of actors as having talent. What does this mean? I don't know, but musicians at least know how to do something... do actors? It's rumored that Humphry Bogart was always slightly ashamed of his profession... that it was a "sissy" line of work... and I think Johnny Depp has always wanted to be a rockstar, but ended up settling for acting.

"Their styles of editing, NOT the adaptor they used to plug the Mac in."

"Music: the end product (ie the sound) is dependent on the equipment used (instrument, amp, effects etc.) Writing: end product (ie the text) is the same regardless of equipment."

Which is why I suggested writing habits / editing styles as the closest equivalent---i.e., the nuts and bolts of creating the work. And I'd also submit that many authors will happily talk about how they can't write unless they're using their old typewriters, or about how they still write everything out longhand before keyboarding it. The elegy-for-the-typewriter alone is practically becoming a literary genre.

Elegy for typewriter alone = hack-song of the pinhed. And longhand is for bonehedz...

txt msg = total possible art 4ever (until someone 4gets)

An actor *must* be able to articulate (broadly) what she's trying to accomplish re: other actors in the scene and her own thruline, in any given moment, well-before she steps on stage. Some actors think this is interesting to you at a party. Many actors i know could use a strong dose of "I'm just the drummer"-style attitude. (tden: Q: What's a "luvvie"?).

But musicians, obviously.

Writing is the same regardless of technology used to do it with?!??

OF

course it is.

And in my experience, musicians are much thicker than actors, but actors are MUCH much more annoying - anyone who thinks the world of ROCK is incestuous and crammed with the incompetent might want to take a look at a fringe play. I did, my eyes were opened and i went back to the comparitive meritocracy of the toilet circuit.

The logistics of making a film (even a small-budget production) are more confounding & unwieldy than making an album.

Bollocks!!! Cause all of the logistics and the hard bits are handled by the director, the producer, the cinematographer, stage hands, boom operators, etc. etc. etc.

You could probably say the same things about making an album, in terms of the producer, the engineer, the managers, etc. - BUT - the process of making an album is far more hands on for musicians than the process of making a film. You will almost always find musicians in the control room during final mixes of an album (OK, except maybe prefab pop) but when do you EVER see an actor in the editing booth of a film? You don't.

As to education/intellect level of musicians, it might be true that music, especially pop/rock music has the lowest entry level of any of The Arts. However, although this may lead to some real Nigel Tuffnel style thickos, I think that as a whole, the broader base makes the whole range of musicians stronger, as they do not draw from solely the same, homongenous pool of well-educated, sensitive, middle class, pretentious intellectuals that you see in "the acting community".

And yes, I am prejudiced cause I am a musician, and I generally can't stand actors.

Sure, the presence of 'thickos' might broaden the musical gene pool in theory, but - the characteristics of stupidity are no more bearable in genres than they are in people - whether it's the siege mentality of people who can't understand the big complicated world and want to destroy it (nu-metal, hip-hop), blissful idiocy (hair- metal, trance), or the 'little knowledge', when banal, trite 'insights' are seen as apocalyptic cosmic epiphanies - like prog, singer-songwriter pop, and every single fucking 60s acid-victim who found God, or Metatron or whoever Carlos Santana's plugging lately.

I mean, the "Politicians and judges and everybody in the world should take LSD"(P McCartney) stupidity, not the "Gabba Gabba Hey!" stupidity.
Then again, I agree with McCartney's statement, but only because it would cause hilarious disasters worldwide for my sadistic enjoyment, not because it would bring about world peace.

Sorry, I was not clear. Stupidity and lack of formal education are not the same thing.

Music is good for having a broad-base, in that its entry level encourages far more people who do not have a formal education than other arts such as acting, writing, etc. I'm not going to turn this into a defense of "outside art" or whatever, but it does make for a more varied and interesting mix of ideas and cultures than something which requires the homogenising effects of intensive formal education.

To be really incendiary, I'll say music has far more of a place for people who are intelligent but uneducated, while acting and writing have far more of a place for people who are educated but unintelligent.

OF course it is. (I don't think it is really)

What exactly is your point?

'Intelligence without formal education' - this implies enough self- education to feed oneself, but don't most 'self-educated' people you know go off on the most ridiculous tangents, lacking any sort of intellectual discipline?
An example of what I have in mind - the Wu-Tang Clan and all their Illuminati horseshit - very entertaining as part of a closed-system alternate world, but it's a bit disturbing to see the amount of fans who swallow their conspiracy-based viewpoint as the definitive model of geopolitics. ESPECIALLY white,. middle-class fans. (Hold on, is that a redundancy?)

'Intelligence without formal education' - this implies enough self- education to feed oneself, but don't most 'self-educated' people you know go off on the most ridiculous tangents, lacking any sort of intellectual discipline?

Hey, what choo tryin' to say here, canuck-boy? 22s!!! Coming out of the wallpaper! Controlled by FREEMASONS!!!! Going to EAT me!!!

Since when is intellectual discipline neccessarily a good thing when it comes to music, and to creativity? Isn't the best music often made by those who are most spuriously out there? People who are intellectually disciplined are far too controlled to ever come up with the sort of mind-blowingly new stuff that actually pushes boundaries.

Then again, I'm not sure how this meshes up with my assertations that you have to know what the artistic rules *are* before you can break them effectively.

Intellectual discipline isn't necessary to come up with wild off-the- wall concepts, but it does help when trying to get the fucking things onto tape. Also, it depends on how out-there and audacious the idea is. For every eye-in-the-pyramid, there's something like Jewel's "Pieces of You", an unintentionally patronizing rehash of warmed-over transactional-analysis platitudes that haven't been in common currency since Esalen.

Tarden, I still don't know what a "luvvie" is.

Kate, you say "music has far more of a place for people who are intelligent but uneducated, while acting and writing have far more of a place for people who are educated but unintelligent." OK first I think this is a v. unproductive dichotomy; I know no one who fits neatly into either category.

Second, Lord knows I can't stand most of the actors that I know - but I think that is generally because LOTS of people get into things for the wrong reason. A lot of actors think they'll get fame and attention when really they'll get the opposite - long hours of hard work in private and a half-empty house. I don't think it has shit to do with "street smarts" vs. "book-smarts". One of the most irritating, talk-your-ear-off actors I know is also the most street-smart, having run away from her home in California at age 15 and teaching herself everything along the way. She makes sure you know all about it too.

Which is "stupid".

A luvvie is British slang for an actor/actress because that's what they often call each other: "Lovey, darling, make us a cup of tea..."

See: Absolutely Fabulous for further clarification.

Miles away, far up this board, David asked about "OF course it is. (I don't think it is really) " - What exactly is your point?

The point i was attempting to demonstrate in a CLEVER/SMART ARSED way was that the way people write changes utterly depending on the technology they use to work with - this is especially clear when people are writing on and with the internet, because it affords fantastic opportunities to do all sorts of stuff, the hyperlink being the most obvious (also the most talked up, also the least used effectively, but still). The way people write on a word processor is very different to how they'd write with a fountain pen - editting, for instance, is a lot quicker and you tend to feel a lot less precious about the actual text, as less physical work went into actually getting on paper/screen. Publishing mediums, as they've changed over centuries have also changed what and how people write - printing presses, for instance, led to a lot of Instant Writing (largely political) which wouldn't have been possible, let alone practical, beforehand.
tell what medium something was written in, whereas you can often see starkly what medium music was created on. I would suggest that this is a FAULT of a lot of musicians, who get so excited and enamoured of the medium itself that they let content go by the by, while a writer is unlikely to publish something just because he wrote it using a New Font or something.

― MJ Hibbett, Friday, 29 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

how come you recognise transactional analysis

Dr Landy told me about it.

The point i was attempting to demonstrate in a CLEVER/SMART ARSED way was that the way people write changes utterly depending on the technology they use to work with (MJ Hibbett)

Surely it doesn't change it utterly? I can see that it could have an influence on the writer's state of mind, but not to the extent you're suggesting.

My original point reiterated:

The end product in music is the sound you hear, and that sound is directly the result of the tools used to create it. If I want an acoustic guitar sound I can't create it with a trumpet.

The end product in writing is the text (not the formatted text, but the series of words that make up the poem or novel or whatever). The original tools used by the writer (eg word processor, fonts etc) do, as you say, have an influence on the creative process, but theoretically the same novel could be written with a word processor or a pencil.