Tim Dick, Classical Music, and the art of writing dreadfully dull columns while trolling for a living ...

Tim Dick, so I'm reliably informed, is a Sydney Morning Herald journalist.

Lest you think of calling him a dickhead, relax, he's already wrung a column out of his name, and here it is under the header Mr Dick speaking.

It's not very funny, but there you go:

... the Macquarie Dictionary's first definition of dick is a detective. That's innocuous enough. The problems apparently start with the next listing, giving my personal surname such meanings as "penis; a foolish, unattractive person; dickhead". I am, of course, not a penis, although I have one, and I don't think I am particularly foolish or unduly unattractive, although both are matters of pure opinion

Speaking of matters of pure opinion, on the weekend, Mr. Dick blessed us with his personal opinion of so-called classical music.

He could have spent just a few words - I don't like it - but instead he spent hundreds, under the header There's just no sound argument for being hooked on classics.

Most likely he was just trawling and trolling for comments, but nobody seemed to give a flying fuck for his matter of pure opinion.

Fair enough. It takes a real dickhead to saunter through the standard set of tripe about so-called classical music, in much the same way as it takes the mindlessly prejudiced only a few short moments to dismiss pop music, lip synching Brittney Spears, jazz, alt country, straight country, rock 'n roll, pub bands, indies, folk, rap, jungle, electronica, the Beatles v the Rolling Stones, the Who v whomever, hits and memories versus whatever's happening now, and whatever else turns others on. But not you.

Well vivre la difference, or some such cheese eating thing, as the French are generally more civilized and amusing.

I don't mind, I like all kinds of music, and different kinds of strokes at different times of day.

And I prefer to read enthusiasts - a Nick Hornby say, writing about his favorite music - than dweebs and tweeds writing about the things they hate. Hornby's enthusiasm is infectious and he's fun to read, and when I get amongst his scribblings, I can almost feign an interest in soccer.

But back to the Dick and his simple-minded musings. Here's a typical sample:

The well-educated are far more likely to go. Why? Snobbery. As Christian Lander put it in his blog-turned-bestseller satire of inner-city white lefties, Stuff White People Like: they don't actually listen to classical music, but they "believe that they are the type of people who would enjoy it".

"There are a number of industries that survive solely upon white guilt: Penguin Classics, the RSPCA, free-range-chicken farms, and the entire rubber bracelet market. Yet all of these pale in comparison to classical music, which has used white guilt to exist for over a century beyond its relevance."

Well there's only one calm, coherent, unemotional, logical, rational Spockian response to that kind of so-called satire. Fuck you and fuck the horse you rode in on.

If you hate classical music why on earth would you go to a concert? To each their own and that sort of blather. Let it go. That's why Christians who stay in their churches and don't say boo to a goose don't get me going. It's when they start telling me sex is bad that we start to get a clash of cultures.

Mr. Dick's personal contribution to the genre of culture clashing is to confess that he walks out of shows:

Even at the New York Philharmonic's 14,900th concert at the Lincoln Centre on Broadway this week, at which both classical superstars Beethoven and Mozart were played in the first half, I couldn't cope with a second. One of the few things classical music has in its favour is a dogmatic retention of the intermission: an escape hatch for those unable to sleep in concert hall seats. I wanted to but couldn't, so I left.

Music is the one thing on this planet we shouldn't have to spend weeks listening to - studying, in other words - to like. For musicians and academics, fine, but for the rest of us, that's not far off the Stockholm Syndrome.

What a trolling sleepy head goose. It took him years of study to understand the 1812 Overture?As thick as a piece of 4 x 2 no doubt. Three chords and he's done in two and a half minutes. Thank god we're not talking about sex. But what on earth makes him think he's speaking for the 'rest of us'. Is delusional grandiosity a characteristic of classical music haters?

Of course audiences for conventional classical music are aging - the last show I attended looked like they'd called it a holiday in the city's nursing homes and given all the oldies a ticket, along with canes and wheel chairs - and those who attend 'popular' music tend to be young, though I like to turn up to make sure the young know that they're in a concert attended by old farts, and therefore the music clearly isn't as trendy as they think (I think I helped ruin Ben Lee's career this way, and the Eels have never been quite the same since I enjoyed their work at the Enmore - but do try them, they're not half bad).

Really Dick is just dickering on in a doom and gloom way as if anybody cares. If you like classical music go to a show, and if you don't, fine, bugger off. Just don't blather on and on like your personal opinion means something more than a personal opinion of a particularly dull ignorant and ill-informed kind:

More people go to see dance than hear classical music, although obscurity does not mean it deserves to disappear. It doesn't, but it has an entirely undeserving hold at the pinnacle of our culture, trading off a reputation that smart people should like it, and without a standing orchestra, a city is a backwater.

Um could it be that Beethoven and Mozart are actually quite clever people, and only dickheads fail to realize it?

Never mind, if you want stupefying banality, Tim Dick is your man:

Advertising people know most classics need a good edit. They know how to reduce a dreary, over-long composition into a good, snappy tune, or at least one that's not soporific.

Oh dear, the Ode to Joy in three minutes. Fan fucking tastic idea bro, that'll lay 'em dead in the aisles.

But there's a reason fewer than one in 10 Australians will bother with a classical concert this year: chances are, it will be dreadfully dull.

Well not so deadly dreadfully dull as the musings of a dickhead. Because journalists and advertising people know that most columnists and their columns need a good edit. They know how to reduce a dreary, over-long composition into a good snappy read, or at least one that's not soporific.

Here's my re-write of T. Dick:

I find classical music dreadfully dull. The end.

Please, no need to applaud. Next thing you know you'll be applauding me before I begin writing, and then after I've finished writing, without realizing that after reading this - if you've got this far - you have a little less of your life left to live.

So it goes, and so, I'm afraid, goes the standard of the scribbling designed to fill up the vacuum known as the National Times masthead in the SMH. For this they expect money?

Save your pennies for a nice pseudo classical score in the movies, ripping off the likes of Bartok and Bernard Herrmann ... oh and whatever you do, don't watch Clockwork Orange. That might involve years of study and a transformation from a blockhead piece of 4 x 2 to a piece of balsa wood ...

UPDATE: It seems somebody has outed me on Facebook as a classical music lover. Sob, I confess, I subscribe to the SSO and I dance with joy at the way Ashkenazy and the band are doing the current Prokofiev season in that pantheon to atheist music, the Opera House. But do I want Tim Dick to turn up to experience pain and suffering? No let him keep on with his lounge lizard ways. Who am I to stand between him and his love of Bing Crosby and Perry Como? I don't even draw the line at Dean Martin, though I do like to take him with a neat single malt scotch ...

(Below: the hare overhears Dick, and a joke for my son).