I’m a big fan of last.fm. I’ve discovered so much amazing music through the related artists section and it helps me generate RSS feeds for shows in my area that I’d like and even feeds for new releases via Soundamus. It’s the perfect organization tool for someone who listens to entirely too much music (seriously, it’s difficult to keep track of all 1,500 artists I like). It also occasionally teaches me something I didn’t know like it did the other day when I came across this picture:

Anton Webern: Wearer of Flower Hats.

You probably don’t recognize this guy. Hell, I wouldn’t recognize him if I didn’t know who I was looking at beforehand. He’s Anton Webern: early 20th century Viennese composer of works such as this:

You may notice that he looks a bit different in the image used for the video. That’s how you normally see this guy, as a stoic intellectual writing music based purely on theory and dissecting stray cats for the sake of science in his spare time. (The latter never happened, but shouldn’t it have?) Even the name of the composition is sterile. Five Pieces for Orchestra? Yes, I guess that’s what they are. He’s not someone we’d expect to be creating flower arrangements.

This is what’s so striking to me about the picture, though. This one image summarily destroys all our preconceptions about what this guy must have been like. It’s tempting to listen to his music and read about him and look at the pictures most commonly used to represent him and determine that he has no soul, that’s he’s barely human, but he clearly is.

This is something that I think happens every day to just about everyone. You look at the people around you and instantly develop ideas about what they are, often overlooking who they are. Even the ugliest, most hateful people are still human; there’s simply no escaping it.