Music

Is something I've been rediscovering for the past year and a half. I'd kind of sucked myself into a black hole of all my favorites from the past and sealed off the progress of music in history, hoping it wasn't true that there were actually people making music past say 1992 that was worth listening to.

1. That's complete hyperbole of course. I'd listened to at least two albums recorded after 1992 before my recent rash of listening.
2. Turns out in any case I was completely wrong and music just keeps growing and growing, despite the fact that no one can make a legitimate living from recorded music anymore, it doesn't seem to be stopping anyone in the least.
3. While my ignorance of music post-1992 is largely a hyperbolic fiction, the fact is that while I thought I had some idea of the music out there, in truth every time I thought I'd even begun to see the tip of the iceberg, I realized that that was really just an icechip at the tip of the tip of the iceberg.
4. Which leads me to wonder, how do people ever find enough damn time to listen to that much music? Bob Boylen or whatever his name is with All Songs Considered, Nic Harcourt, sure they're paid to do nothing but listen to music all the time and bully for them. But what about the average schlump with a day job? Add wife and child?
5. So thank god for shared iTunes libraries at work. Thank God for music-obsessed friends with a lot of money and nothing else they want to do with their time. Thank God for All Songs Considered and Radio Paradise and Pandora and KCRW.
   
6. No purpose is being served by this enumerated list, but, eh, whatever.
7. Is this actually my first post on music on a blog named after a song?

Which leads me to want to maybe focus on this for a while? Or, y'know, the miracle and wonder and misery and crushed dreams of creativity in general.

As for politics

Obama. Can I say, of course? Especially lately Clinton has suddenly made me realize why people could ever have disliked the Clintons so much. I never really understood the crazed, feverish tone of Clinton-haters, and now suddenly I'm thinking, "Hmmmm..."

I read Audacity of Hope a few months ago (or really had read to me by the author by virtue of the modern miracle of the recorded voice captured by spinning disc borrowed from the local library, transplanted into the pure binary audioverse of the Ipod and played back mostly in a vehicle moving between home and work) which just struck me as unhealthily honest for a book written by a politician, and that was it, I was hooked. That he has even made it this far, to me, slightly staggers the imagination.

But that said, I'm seriously attempting to shut off that part of my head. I've realized that politics is an unhealthy obsession, one that I've wasted far too much time on in this life, and one that in the real world will only bring a sensitive soul unnecessary torments, when there are so many genuine, real, personal torments available by the bucketload that one should be using ones meager supply of seconds on this planet to deal with and grapple with and write endless screeds about. I'll vote and do my part and all that and break down and blog about this in the future again because I'm weak, but for the moment I just want to acknowledge a truth of which I've become cleanly aware, before going there again.

Weird Internet Twins

About the same time a month ago when I actually looked at this thing again and realized, whoa, it was still here, I stumbled on another blog (thelittleblackegg as opposed to littleblackegg) and found a like-minded soul - I guess not surprisingly considering the choice of blog names - only far better read and listened and generally evolved, right down to the fact that he's making a terrible go of it as an independent writer and copyeditor and basically doing anything he can to keep it together and not have to retreat back into an office ever again. He's not really doing very well at it, but the salient point is that he has this brain going a million miles an hour to my hundred and he really is obsessed with music and books in a way that I used to be (and dream of still being). Admittedly I was never quite as eloquent with my obsession as he is, or if I was I've forgotten, but in any case here I am, harried, overworked, overtired, extremely parental, and that state of being is one which I am now currently in the process of re-establishing as my ideal, but am far from reaching as my actual.

And then Kelley just let me know that I guess I let ownership of robbfritz.com lapse, and some Broadway junkie, maybe an actor?, gobbled it up to start a now six-month outdated blog on the Broadway strike, which is like some quantum mechanically generated other-worldly weird ghost of my high school self out there wandering the streets and getting all feverish over Broadway and writing a blog about it. So there they are, two strange internet twins. Kelley mentioned after finding the robbfritz.com site that there's a term she read for it, "googlegangers", which, yeah, there it is.

Now what was I talking about?

I've been wanting to do this again, but just didn't want to get back into the political thing, and didn't know how else to start and basically just got all confused and balled up and stopped thinking about starting all over again.

Eels song Going Fetal.... yessir. The blogging fetal position. Current politics and a lack of creativity in general are going to drive me there.