Music – Page 23 – Wis[s]e Words

layaway

Published on December 18, 20112 Comments

Via Metafiler comes a story that restores some of your faith in humanity. In America there’s a tradition of layaways, setting aside something you want to buy but don’t have the money for just yet and pay for it in installments, after which you can pick it up. It’s old enough that the Isley Brothers could make it into a metaphor for delayed love and thanks to the crisis it’s gotten a new lease on life. Layaways are popular, especially this time of year, to pay for Christmas presents.

But of course, if you’re poor enough to need to pay for Christmas this way, you may end up never quite getting all the money you need to pay off your layaways. Which is where an army of secrets santas has come in, as all over America anonymous people have paid off layaway tabs for complete strangers:

— Indiana. “An anonymous woman made a special trip to the Indianapolis Super Kmart and paid off the outstanding layaway balances of several customers, according to ABC affiliate station WRTV-TV6.”

— South Carolina. ” ‘Probably two weeks ago, we started seeing people coming in asking to randomly pay off strangers’ layaways,’ Terry Northcutt, manager of the Mount Pleasant Kmart, told Mount Pleasant Patch. It adds that “so far, eight shoppers have come in to pay off stranger’s layaways, and as similar stories across the country are reported, Northcutt expects to see more.”

— Nebraska. “Dona Bremser, an Omaha nurse, was at work when a Kmart employee called to tell her that someone had paid off the $70 balance of her layaway account, which held nearly $200 in toys for her 4-year-old son,” the AP says. “I was speechless,” Bremser told the wire service. “It made me believe in Christmas again.”

What makes this so good is not so much that this solves anybody’s problems, as that it brings some cheer to people who can use it the most. I’ve never been really poor myself, though I’ve been skint sometimes, but I imagine that one of the most awful bits of being poor is having that feeling that you’re not allowed to have nice things, a feeling that must be even worse at Christmas time. Having some stranger pay for your presents this way, without expecting anything in return or wanting publicity for it, in short without having any of the trappings of charity.

Not fair

Published on December 11, 2011Leave a comment

To have them on during the Strictly results show.

Four weeks ago now…

Published on December 5, 2011Leave a comment

What do you do after you met, lived with and lost the love of your life? Other than write maudlin posts on your blog that is?

No idea, but it has been four weeks since Sandra died, almost a month since she was cremated and that means I can shortly pick up her ashes — another milestone I’d rather not have reached so soon.

Last Saturday I spent part of the afternoon listening to another of Sandra’s favourite bands, Steely Dan, whose brand of mellow, technically perfect, coked up yacht rock is not quite the sort of music you’d think she’d enjoyed when you know she spent most of the seventies trawling record stores for import funk and dancing to northern soul at the Wigam casino, but she did. What she liked was how mellifluous they sounded, the calm perfection of their sound. She hated any sudden loud noises, discords, anything that jared and whatever you think of Steely Dan, their music always flowed and flowed smoothly.

Perfect late night reading music, with a glass of whisk(e)y or cognac and a good book, a cat somewhere and a roaring fire.

A month in music

Published on November 25, 2011Leave a comment

I couldn’t do this:

“There are 10,513 MP3s on my hard disk. According to iTunes, that’s nearly 30 days worth of music. It has taken half my life – 15 years – to build this collection but I decided to listen to them all in one go. One continuous concert, playing songs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I wanted to revist all the songs I’d once loved, and the memories and places they called up. The only choice I made was the first track. After that, the computer randomly decided what was going to play. No stopping. No skipping. No changing the volume. Music, all the time, for a whole month. The Month In Music blog charts the progress of the playback project, updated once a day with original writing and photography.”

First off, I just suck at writing about music, for the most part barely able to even say why I like a given song, album or artist other then “I like it”. (I leave that to Kasper the funky ghost and his chums. )But a bigger obstacle would be putting my music on random because I just can’t listen to music that way, other than when I got the radio on. When I’m listening to music I tend to be in the mood for a particular kind of music: a particular artist or genre or period and I tend to listen to complete albums — I loathe shuffle.

Also, if you play your music 24/7 it gets annoying fast and you can’t do anything like watching tv or anything else that interferes with the music. Not to mention that you’d be playing a lot to empty rooms, or in my case, the cats — and they’d rather have Radio 4 because that’s what they grew up with.

But it does demonstrate an important aspect of music that’s far less true of other media like television, videogames, books or movies: it takes much less time to gain some fluency and insight into a given musical genre than it does to gain the same sort of mastery in most other media. To put it in raw numbers: I got about 2500 books in my personal library. To read them all would take me at least, if I did nothing else and could finish one in two days, some 5000 days or thirteen years. My library at the moment holds almost thirtythousand songs, which would cost me almost 881/2 days to listen to if I can believe Itunes.

Found via Metafilter (yes, I’m on Metafilter now.) Check out the thread; it’s quite good if only for seeing all the other obsessive compulsives waxing on about their cataloquing strategies…

Sandra’s music

Published on November 8, 2011Leave a comment

So much of the music I like today was formed through Sandra’s tutoring. She was a child of the seventies as I was of the eighties, but much more involved in music and listening to music than I ever was. So she told me of the time she saw Blondie perform in Plymouth at a time when nobody knew them yet, of going to see Depeche Mode in Atlanta when she lived there because you went to every English band coming over because not so many English bands hit Georgia back then, of dancing in the Wigan Casino and other near-mythical discotheques. She collected music and rare records at a time when that didn’t mean having a large hard drive and a fast internet connection, when you still had to hunt for that import single in scruffy record stores in dodgy neighbourhoods, building up a massive collection of vinyl, then losing it all when one of her uncles cleared out her father’s house after his death…

In day to day life she prefered to have the radio on (BBC radio 4, natch) rather than have music on in the background, having to a certain extent grown tired of it, or at least having it on all the time. She wasn’t really interested anymore in being nerdy obsessive about her music, though was still open to new stuff. She liked hip-hop, funk, pop music like the Style Council, baroque composers like Handel or Telemann but not twentieth century composers like Stravinsky, jazz of course, everything that sounded mellifluous, so Dutch language songs were right out…

She introduced me to everything from Ann Peebles, Bill Withers, Marvin Gaye, the Brothers Johnson and George Benson (which would always recall summer holidays in France with her parents for her), Chaka Khan/Rufus, Outkast, De La Soul, Digible Planets, Dizzee Rascal, The Streets, Billie Holliday, Ella, Half Man Half Biscuit, and so on unsoweiter.