1/28/14 - "Fame is vapor, popularity an accident, riches take wing, and only character endures." Horace Greeley
5/18/13 - Musical richness and variety falls on deaf ears. Multitudes cave in to sameness ad nauseum. Musicians play the same chords, same dynamics, same rhythm, same cadenza, same songs over and over again gig after gig recital after recital, year after year. A real grind, usually done for sake of money. Is there any wonder that machines have taken over the creative aspects of music? Beat boxes do a better job of generating rhythmic variety and meaning than real musicians. Not to blame the musicians however, music is increasingly commoditized, marginalized, secondary, pushed to the background, a mere spectator sport, mere accompaniment to the barrage of visual mass-media overstimulation that besieges us every waking moment. The senses are dulled, imagination is stifled. Musicians collectively are lifeless, cliche, over-played, over-practiced, under appreciated, uninspired and simply bored.
The end of music: Pop music is the only thing that people want to listen to because it's the only thing most people can hear. Top 40 coddles the ear like mother's milk to an infant, precluding listeners from exploring all the musical flavors in the world, relegating listeners to an infantile view of musical experience. In classical music, ...playlists, a bastardization of 700 years of classical music is less about the pure musical experience and more about daily pacification. Recall Charles Ives' unforgettable words for an audience member who squirmed upon hearing the dissonance of Ives' pieces, "take it like a man!" If listeners don't venture beyond their musical comfort zone, they'll never expose their musical palette to all there is to savor. Like a middle-aged person still eating twinkles.
4/5/13 - "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." Viktor Frankl
2/17/13 - We being enamored of technology, scientific materialism, this macho experiment; we once stood at the precipice, saber-rattling as though there were spoils for the victor, when there was only "Mutually Assured Destruction," the underlying logic of the nuclear arms race, a guarantee of total annihilation, destruction of every achievement that makes us the laudable creature that we suppose ourselves to be. What next? Genetic engineering.
1/19/13 - "It ain't what people know that's causes trouble, it's what they know that ain't so." Josh Billings (19th century humorist)
12/27/12 - Re: Fiscal Cliff - "I am going to ask you too begin our study of Democracy by considering it as a big balloon filled with gas or hot air, and sent up so that you shall be kept watching whilst other people are picking your pockets." - George Bernard Shaw
12/3/12 - People typically don't give a sh.t until it's too late.
11/30/12:
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11/29/12: - Personally, if I had a choice between leaving America's ideological future in the hands of the tea partiers or the mentally disabled children of this country, I'd pick the children. At least there's no hate.
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11/20/12: - Bill Gates, the richest man in the United States, $63 billion, equivalent to the GDP of Libya, the 62nd wealthiest country in the world. He has so much money that giving it away is a full time job, especially since he's announced that he's giving away most of it. Too bad other Microsoft shareholders don't follow his example.
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11/19/12 - I think he looks better, don't you?
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11/17/12 - Fail. Someday online music providers like Pandora, LastFM, Sirius, iTunes, Amazon, etc. will get serious about supplying musician credits and liner notes along with the recordings they distribute. Guess their marketing people think listeners shouldn't and don't give a sh.t., no surprise given that mass-media marketing's primary focus is to lobotomize the public for profit.
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11/14/12 - There's a dog in the upstairs apartment, which howls constantly when the owner is away, and the owner is away daily. The dog howls, bewildered, suffering, pleading for the owner to return. When she does return, the dog rejoices, "at last my pleas were heard," not knowing the owner's return is unrelated to its howling. As this dog howls each day, so people pray, and God answers peoples' prayers for the same reason the dog's owner returns home.