A blathering rant that maybe doesn't matter. But what are blogs for?

(First off I have to say I stole this image from a museum site or somewhere but am using it to make a visual point so if I did something wrong notify me and I will take it off. The piece is credited below in this long and dragged out story.)

The following entry includes themes of movie soundtracks, increasing personal awareness, and the dumbing of American youth through the use of cellphones due to a hypothesis I have created which I like to call "Everpresentism"

I saw There Will Be Blood yesterday. A great movie that I dreamt about the entire night. Not fun. It's a chewy one that lends itself to lots of cerebral pondering. That's a quality I love in movies. Anyway, I was really interested in the music and was certain that it was that of Gyorgy Ligeti, which is strange. The Baader-Meinhof syndrome has been in the works for the last few weeks regarding this composer. It started with watching the documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life In Pictures. The most compelling minute of the entire documentary was an interview with Ligeti who said he had originally written the music that was used in 2001: ASO and The Shining at a time when he was living under Nazi oppression, spent time in a concentration camp, some of his family were killed by the Nazi's. When he wrote this music he envisioned punching and twisting his fist into Hitler's guts. Maybe he didn't quite say it that way but that is what he was inferring. WOW! No wonder that music is so scary. I certainly knew his music from those movies but had no idea who he was and I immediately had to investigate him. That was compelling stuff. I downloaded some of his music from iTunes and have been driving around the snowy barren Wisconsin landscape listening to his haunting music scaring the living bejesus out of myself. Kinda fun. Inspiring. I then made an iMovie for my own amusement about doing laundry and put some of his music on it. It turned out pretty good I must say and received a rave review from a fellow film aficionado. If anything can make something as mundane as laundry drying on a line scary, well then, you know it is stuff of greatness. But it really is all about the music.
So when watching Blood, the opening shot fades in on desert hills with the creepy dissident rising strains of strings. Later there were the clacka clacka noises, all of it very Shining sounding. So, to my surprise, I see that the soundtrack is credited to a Jonny Greenwood, a member of the band Radiohead. So I read his Wikipedia bio and see he admires the work of Krzysztof Penderecki. I don't know who he is, so I Wik him and see his music was used as the opening theme of The Shining. Aha! We are coming full circle now! He is next on my list of downloads. A piece of his entitled Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima was originally called 8'37", a nod in turn to John Cage, so many musical connections! The information is getting to have such deep historical context!
So this is where the irking begins. I read peoples reviews of Greenwood's soundtrack for There Will Be Blood on iTunes and they all rave about it. Some people are cagey enough to compare him to Penderecki and Ligeti but no one accuses him of out and out copying. One said he takes cues from these two. Um, I beg to differ. It was sort of like a cut and paste job of their work. Effective yes, but new and innovative? Most just rave about the genius of his work. They have no idea what all this "genius" is based on.

This reminded me of a college art class critique circa 1984 in 3-D Design. The project was to take something functional and make it nonfunctional. One guy took an iron and attached nails to the bottom of it. Right away the professor asked who made this piece and then said something to the effect that he should "try to make something somewhat original". The guy did not understand. The prof said Man Ray did this exact piece about 60 years ago and asked the student if he had ever seen it? Some of us in the class knew this piece very well. The guy claims he had not. I and others really didn't believe the student hadn't seen it because it is an iconic image from the Dada movement. Notwithstanding, maybe he hadn't. The guy had done a really good job and it was sort of a shame that a stroke of simple brilliance had come over him to create the piece but as the teacher pointed out that though it did not look exactly like the above, it was a literal interpretation of the same idea. It is one thing to pay homage to someone by use of subtle hints to earlier work, but to copy a basic idea, even unknowingly, doesn't count. The guy got a low grade and the piece was basically disregarded. Obviously this made some impact on me, especially the ease of the indifference paid to the student. This lead to more discussions about ideas like everything has been done before, there is no such thing as "new", what is plagiarism?, or just blatantly copying from lesser known people and owning it, etc..
I want to say that I am sure Mr. Jonny Greenwood is very aware of his art. It is not him I have a problem but with the youth of America. Reading iTunes reviews of his work on the soundtrack is what has got me worried. It may be my middle age talking, but I worry about the intellect of the younger American set and I blame this lack of knowledge to the fact that there is a decrease of any art and music appreciation being taught anymore, being brushed aside as something less important, lost to the "no child left behind" crap and a total loss of any historical context no matter what the subject. I also want to put some of the blame of this on the invention of the cellphone. Example: I see people all the time, walking around, saying things like, "what are you doing now?" or telling someone useless information such as, "I am in the deli aisle". I have been on college campuses and seen students walk out of their class, immediately get on their cellphone and talk to someone about their next move. Shouldn't they be contemplating what they just sat through? The cellphone is keeping them in the ever present. I believe people are becoming addicted to the present. Keeping in contact with people constantly never gives the person time to pause and reflect on what has happened and in a sense could lead to a total disregard for anything of the past. As I get older I worry about the loss of short term memory, It just happens, believe me. Maybe I could lay off the whiskey but I don't think that is all to blame. I see this even on the smallest level an issue of concern. What they are missing is the underlying context of connections to a greater base of knowledge about a broader sense of history. Does that tongue twister make sense? I do not own a cellphone just for the fact that I don't want people to know my every move nor I theirs. I may own one some day but for now I see them as a major annoyance. They seem to keep people in a state of everpresent anxiety or maybe it's a state of reflection anxiety. I am still working on my hypothesis.
All these Radiohead fans blindly buying this soundtrack thinking the guy is a "genius" have no idea of all the historical context his soundtrack contains. They worry if he will win the Academy Award for the soundtrack. GOD! Is that really important? On a level of entertainment trivia, yes, but man they are missing the boat.