About This Site - Postscript

Phonographia.com - "What's It All About?"


By Doug Boilesen


Phonographia's "About This Site" is a fairly standard "About" page.

As I was writing that page, however, I kept hearing Dionne Warwick singing "What's It All About?" from the movie "Alfie." And that triggered two thoughts: First, that even an "About" page of Phonographia has connections. And second, those connections should be noted -- but not in the "About" page.

So this postscript is for a few "What's It All About" phonograph connections.

Johnathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind, explains that writers who have fascinations with their subjects often come to believe that "the object of their fascination is the key to understanding everything."

Here's how the social psychologist Haidt writes about this phenomenon and how it is applicable to his own book:

"People who devote their lives to studying something often come to believe that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding everything. Books have been published in recent years on the transformative role in human history played by cooking, mothering, war...even salt. This is one of those books. I study moral psychology, and I'm going to make the case that morality is the extraordinary human capacity that made civilization possible. I don't mean to imply that cooking, mothering, war and salt were not also necessary, but in this book I'm going to take you on a tour of human nature and history from the perspective of moral psychology."

Phonographia is clearly not the key to understanding everything nor is it about the all.

However, the phonograph does have innumerable connections with popular culture when you consider all of its multiple-degrees- of-separation connections (i.e, 6 degrees of separation and interconnections).

The following are a few examples of Phonographia's serendipitous connections related to its alternate "About This Site" nomen, i.e., "What's It All About"?



Pat Metheny LP album "What's It All About", Nonesuch Records ©2011

 





What's it all about, Alfie?

 





The Hokey Pokey

 








"do the hokey pokey" LP 33 1/3 RPM, Peter Pan Records 8073 - 1969



 

 

 

"My Records!"




 



Monty Python's The Meaning of Life LP, CBS 1983

 









Courtesy Bill Woodman and The New Yorker, 1992

 

 






 

Courtesy Pete McKee and the Ministry of Audio Pleasure from the Thud, Crackle, Pop exhibition, 2014