Thoughts

So far this is a very excellent project. I'm really glad I'm doing this.

I'm rediscovering html. Learning stuff trying to figure things like sound embedding. I love the internet, if I want to learn to do something, I can just google it and read enough instructions until I get it. And it's all sort of building on each other.

I'm realizing I am in a love affair with media.

Listening to NPR now. I realize what I love about it: I love its ability to connect so many disparate points of our lives and those of others, of our society. And it does so with such a voice. Listening to it alone, and letting the thoughts run over your mind, it's like briefly letting someone else take over, thinking with someone else's stream of consciousness. It's very intimate, and it's the kind of feeling we don't have day to day in our lives, interacting with people.

I think that's sad. I wish life was such that we could walk in and out of each other's minds without fear. But there are so many things that help to keep our truest selves tucked away.

But that's why I love media. Especially the kind of media like NPR that has this kind of voice. When I was working in the library at school I picked up The Dream of a Common Language, and I immediately fell hard in love with the poem of that name. Excerpt:

It’s simple to wake from sleep with a stranger,
dress, go out, drink coffee,
enter a life again. It isn’t simple
to wake from sleep into the neighborhood
of one neither strange nor familiar
whom we have chosen to trust. Trusting, untrusting,
we lowered ourselves into this, let ourselves
downward hand over hand as on a rope that quivered
over the unsearched…. We did this. Conceived
of each other, conceived each other in a darkness
which I remember as drenched in light.
I want to call this, life.

But I can’t call it life until we start to move
beyond this secret circle of fire
where our bodies are giant shadows flung on a wall
where the night becomes our inner darkness, and sleeps
like a dumb beast, head on her paws, in the corner.

But it doesn't have to be academic, I mean that's part of what makes me (and everyone?) fall in love with bands, movies, books, photos, art...Jon Stewart, Colbert, David Sedaris, that's what makes me love their comedy--I guess for me the division between comedy, art, literature, music all seem irrelevant. Yes, this is technically a music blog. But life is musical so is music then lifelike? life-ical? Oh words.

Anyway, I guess if I could do anything, I'd want someone someday to read my book (or blog?), or hear my song (or playlist?), or listen to (or read?) me musing in such a way that it struck them in the same way so many things have struck me.

I want to develop my voice, and for that reason I'm glad I'm doing this.



P.S. Case in point about Adrienne Rich, reading Fox. It's not technically music but it's close.