sorry slava. it was slava who thought up this name for a Canadian band. He later Googled the name and found that there already a band called the Zambonis. This is one more illustration of the fact that we are not these independent original thinkers that the West is so invested in our being. The publication of my book, In Southern Light, in the same season as a novel called Southern Light and a book on the Antarctic, Southern Light, also brings home, as I have described in “A Writer Looks At His Career,” that our creativity operates within circumscribed cultural and linguistic parameters. We are constantly and often unconsciously ripping each other off, particularly when it comes to music. My tunes are a conscious or unconscious reworking of the limited musical possibilities my mind has been exposed to, of my mental music bank, as it were, which we all have, along with a smell bank.
Have you ever experienced instant recognition in a whiff of something you have smelled in fifteen years ? Yesterday morning for some reason, the song “It’s Now or Never,” which I hadn’t thought of or hummed or sung for decades, suddenly came unbidden. I was surprised it was an Elvis a hit. The tempo is a bolero. I thought it was a Latino standard like Besame Mucho.
But it was I, to have the last word on this, who came up with The Fabulous Zambonis, making it sound like a highwire act rather than the machine that smooths over the ice of hockey rinks between periods. This goes to show, again, that the building blocks of our creative activity are not really ours. Which is why I think music should be free. Who owns it, any more than anybody can own a piece of land and all the organisms growing and living on it.
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Alex you forgot to mention, who gave this name first.
sorry slava. it was slava who thought up this name for a Canadian band. He later Googled the name and found that there already a band called the Zambonis. This is one more illustration of the fact that we are not these independent original thinkers that the West is so invested in our being. The publication of my book, In Southern Light, in the same season as a novel called Southern Light and a book on the Antarctic, Southern Light, also brings home, as I have described in “A Writer Looks At His Career,” that our creativity operates within circumscribed cultural and linguistic parameters. We are constantly and often unconsciously ripping each other off, particularly when it comes to music. My tunes are a conscious or unconscious reworking of the limited musical possibilities my mind has been exposed to, of my mental music bank, as it were, which we all have, along with a smell bank.
Have you ever experienced instant recognition in a whiff of something you have smelled in fifteen years ? Yesterday morning for some reason, the song “It’s Now or Never,” which I hadn’t thought of or hummed or sung for decades, suddenly came unbidden. I was surprised it was an Elvis a hit. The tempo is a bolero. I thought it was a Latino standard like Besame Mucho.
But it was I, to have the last word on this, who came up with The Fabulous Zambonis, making it sound like a highwire act rather than the machine that smooths over the ice of hockey rinks between periods. This goes to show, again, that the building blocks of our creative activity are not really ours. Which is why I think music should be free. Who owns it, any more than anybody can own a piece of land and all the organisms growing and living on it.