Making Music, Literally

I used to occasionally buy music from Amazon. But since I cancelled my Amazon credit card – because the issuing bank was going to slap on some minimum payment every month even if I had no balance – thus denying me access to some Amazon points I’d get from purchasing from them, I’ve been less inclined.

Still, I occasionally need new music. Or music that is new again to me. I have a bunch of LPs in the attic I cannot access because the area is under a long-delayed refurbishing, including insulating.

The thing to do: go to the library, take out albums I already have on vinyl, copy them, then listen to them. Understand that I have absolutely no guilt about doing this.

Baseball on PBS

I’ve been watching Baseball recently. Not baseball, which I have viewed from time to time, but the TV “two-part, four-hour documentary film directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick,” BASEBALL: THE TENTH INNING. I’m a big fan of the original nine-part series, and have even borrowed the expansive coffee-table book associated with it.

For me, I think the problem is that

N is for Nostalgia

At some level, I’m not a very nostalgic guy. As Billy Joel put it in Keeping the Faith, and I quote, The good old days weren’t always good. It seems as though, in the US, there are dreams of the 1950s being the “good old days”, represented by TV shows such as Ozzie and Harriet or Father Knows Best, with dad out working all day, with mom home raising the kids and wearing pearls when her husband came home for dinner. It was never MY experience.

The 1950s were a period of the cold war paranoia of “duck and cover”, and an unsettling racial climate