Happy New Life!

In almost exactly twenty-four hours, I will perform -- quite literally perform -- my yearly hypocrisy. I will sit on a stage and play the drums in a band for New Year's Eve. When the clock strikes midnight, I will play "Auld Lang Syne" as if I give a flying cupcake. In reality, I have never cared about New Year's Eve, nor about many other markers of time and transition.

Others see the new year as a new beginning and they see a reason to mark graduation from kindergarten through college. But I simply am not, and never have been, moved by these things. I'm not sure why. I do think maybe we should not place so much importance in transitions and time-markers, especially regarding a goal that just about everyone achieves, like high school graduation. (If I ever win a Nobel prize for literature, there may be a party in order . . .)

The Video Question

Recently, when I posted about musical "soul" a new reader, Lincoln Hunter, posed this excellent question as a result of a video I embedded:

Why does so much music come with a video? Do I need it if I have a soul for music? Isn't the video a diversion, a distraction? Am I not being manipulated by the video? . . .  I really would like to hear someone explain the use of video with a piece of music. Perhaps you will have time to answer in a post in the future.

Why marry music to video, indeed? In my response to Lincoln, I mentioned that I prefer music on its own terms -- as a lone art form. But, I am certainly a member of the video generation . . .

Sugar Free Optimism

Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music -- the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.

-- Henry Miller

Christmas is over and I don't care. I never have, even as a kid. I have always loved the holiday, but I have never had a problem saying goodbye to it.

For years I would listen to people being depressed about the end of Christmas and I would think there was something wrong with me not to feel the same, but I have come to realize that I am, as surprising as it might seem to some of my friends and family who hear me complain and critique the world a lot, an optimist.

Dear Albrecht: II

Albrecht Soothspitz (b.1327)

Bottom line is, Albrecht happens to love both mulled wine and wassail. Go figure. The number of letters pouring in to "Dear Albrecht" is overwhelming, but Albrecht is doing his best. What with his being pretty drunk most of the time (we've been heating wassail and mulled wine in vats for him) and coupled with the fact that he answers his mail in calligraphy on skin pages and then makes me type things onto the blog, he can only answer a few at a time, but he is doing his best, so please show some Christmas patience. Anyway, this week's letters:

Our Musical Soul

"Soul" has been referred to as a certain quality in music for years. "He's got soul," someone will say. People even sometimes categorize soul (though more rarely these days) as a form of music -- now I guess it is R&B.

(Here's where some twit comments that I don't know anything about pop music history and sets me straight on the differences between R&B and "soul". Watch me respond by making a fart noise with my armpit. Ever see the things filed in R&B in a music store? Yeah -- there is no definition. Classifying music is -- and should be -- like trying to file different types of steam in manilla folders.)

But one thing I see as consistent is that people associate a soulful performance with an R&B sound or with that sort of vocal earthiness associated with what was once callad "black American music."