Just finished reading Oliver Sacks’ “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”. Based on the first few chapters, I thought I would really get into the book. But towards the end Sacks’ style was beginning to bother me a little and I sensed that the later stories were being scraped from underneath the barrel. However, I did enjoy the book and there were a few passages that drew my attention. This one in particular:
The power of music, narrative and drama is of the greatest practical and theoretical importance. One may see this even in the case of idiots, with IQs below 20 and the extremest motor incompetence and bewilderment. Their uncouth movements may disappear in a moment with music and dancing – suddenly, with music, they know how to move. We see how the retarded, unable to perform fairly simple tasks involving perhaps four or five movements or procedures in sequence, can do these perfectly if they work to music – the sequence of movements they cannot hold as schemes being perfectly holdable as music, i.e. embedded in music. The same may be seen, very dramatically, in patients with severe frontal lobe damage and apraxia – an inability to do things, to retain the simplest motor sequences and programmes, even to walk, despite perfectly preserved intelligence in all other ways. This procedural defect, or motor idiocy, as one might call it, which completely defeats any ordinary system of rehabilitative instruction, vanishes at once if music is the intructor. All this, no doubt, is the rationale, or one of the rationales, of work songs.
For as little as I watch television, and as little as I follow mainstream entertainment, I find it interesting that after reading those words Britney Spears is the first thing to come to mind. Perhaps it is because I stopped paying attention to top-40 music right around the time Britney and her virgin-esque dancing was entering our collective consciousness.
Anyway, speaking of dancing, here is some obscure JCVD:
van damme he can dance
