WALKING ON THIN ICE

 

i insulted my love’s taste in music - not what one should do on valentine’s day. the bus driver to beziers was playing sade, and i compared her sound to ambient elevator muzak - said it was toilet paper music, except toilet paper at least had a function. just call me mister smooth. it’s neither wise nor fair to run down music within other’s hearing. if one must judge - and judge one must - judge within, quietly. evaluation is important. as novelist Maxine Hong Kingston said, “All human beings have this burden in life to constantly figure out what’s true, what’s authentic, what’s meaningful, what’s dross, what’s a hallucination, what’s a figment, what’s madness. We all need to figure out what is valuable, constantly.”

i myself have shameful music in my past. used to love the mantovani orchestra. mantovani took all the hits of the day and played them as slow syrupy instrumentals, making each song sound the same - elevator music before such a category existed. he also pop-ized classical tunes for those needing classical-lite. even more embarrassing, i once loved the ‘poetry’ of rod mckuen - whose words are closer to american greeting card verse than poetry.

these are shameful memories, but not necessarily shameful acts. i now realize we need all the rungs of the musical ladder from low to high, bad to good, easy to hard, simple to complex. in my youth, i used each rung to climb to the one above. without listening to andy williams, i never would have graduated to tony bennet - without bennett, i may never have found frank sinatra. without the mindless mantovani, i may never have moved on to the mental meat of meat beat manifesto, or the might of miles davis.

for some, each rung leads to another. for others, a particular rung is enough. if one derives pleasure from rap, who am i to say it’s crap? pleasure is pleasure, to each their own.

this is true for all aspects of life.

i was in a british petroleum elevator when a mantovani muzak instrumental oozing from the speaker kept tugging at my brain… took awhile to realize it was “i can’t get no satisfaction” by the rolling stones. what a sad delicious moment to realize these icons of dark spunk had been inducted into the hall of sham. same thing happened when the queen knighted mick jagger. sad to see society co-opt their enemies, and the enemy acquiesce. i sometimes think even the strongest outsider would quickly sell out for a piece of inside pie. my price would probably be fame.

i’ve lost my wife to the Second Life on-line simulated world. she signed on last night and was gone for hours before staggering off to bed. today she’s back there. she even suggested i log in so we could talk to each other in cyber-land. we’re sitting side by side on the couch - why would i want to go to some unknown server so my avatar could talk to her avatar in sym-time - unless we could maybe have some cyber sex and i could sit here and watch. i’ve lost my wife to second life when she hasn’t even mastered her first. o well, we’ve had a delightful 17.5 months relationship and a darn fine 11 months of marriage. maybe i’ll sign-on on our upcoming wedding anniversary and wish her a happy first year.

tried to log on to Second Life just now for my first time - to be with my wife - and was told by that world i did not exist. i think they just want my woman - they probably fear my power. they admit they recognize my name and password, but refuse to let me in. it really ticks me off when i play by their rules and still get fricked over. so, frig them, their fickle finger führer, and their pile of it.

which leads to… walking back from the next village, we smelled animal offal. looked about and saw a humungous pile of deep chocolate brown manure - must have been 50 foot high. can you imagine the size of the dog needed to do that? biggest pile of crap i’ve seen outside washington d.c.

on the subject of large piles of waste, this is a quote for those in congress who voted against america by killing habeas corpus and legitimizing dick cheney’s and george bush’s war crimes by voting for the military commissions act:

“The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious, and the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.” — Winston Churchill.

even churchill is calling the cheney-bush beast a nazi.