To have them on during the Strictly results show.
Music
Four weeks ago now…
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
“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
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.
The science fiction helps
Sandra is not doing well, as is to be expected, but while she’s getting weaker, there still is the possibility that she can hang on a while longer, as her stubborn body fights her will to die… Not a nice position to be in. Sadly, there isn’t much we can do to help her, other than be there.
For myself, it’s all right as long as I don’t have to think too much.
Update: forgot to mention what also helps a lot is the well wishes and sympathy you all have shown over this. Thank you.