Garage Sale

 My last blog entry was mid-March. This hiatus is due to a myriad of factors: some personal, some
family, some societal and some mental coalescing into a block of Brobdingnagian proportions. Left behind is a aggregation of snippets that never came to fruition.

I have collected them here, a literary garage sale so to speak. Okay, not an original idea, Ken Kesey

did the same thing in the early 70s with a collection of pieces he had previously written. As C.S. Lewis said, "...no man who worries about originality will ever by original..." Hopefully cleaning out the recesses of my mind's attic will allow for a complete thought to emanate into a complete blog.

So here is a collection of the starts and stops formed over the last few months.

Friends - over the years I have noticed that I put my friends in circles bounded by geography, time and circumstances: work friends, friends from childhood, college(s) there were several, fellow musicians, drinking buddies, etc. Like a Venn diagram some cross into other groups. What amazed me most about this realization was that I remembered what a Venn diagram was.

Music - reviewing my collection of music, I realize that I prefer the early works of most of the bands/musicians I enjoy. There's something about their music before they become popular that separates the early stuff from later work. I don't know if it's a rawness, a feeling of exploration, a naivete, but usually the initial stuff is my favorite.

 Contrarianism - I have always heard the different drummer ala Thoreau. In my family everyone hated the black jelly beans. They became my favorite. When arena rock bands ruled the airways, I listened exclusively to Chicago blues and be-bop jazz. Most guys' first date place is the movies. I'd take the mademoiselle du jour to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Invariably, they'd want to see the Impressionists. I'd feign confusion about where to go, though I knew the museum like the back of my hand, end up at the Abstract and Dada collections.

When I moved in with Kristin, she was curious about my music collection. I played for here my Sun Ra CDs. Her reaction was blunt. Weeks later, I turned her on to Booker T. & the MGs (who she was not familiar with - that's what you get for growing up in the 80s), Allen Toussaint and Professor Longhair.  Her look was priceless! "You had music like this and played that other stuff?" She's still
with me, so the antithetical attitude works...sometimes. - as ever BB

"Contrariwise, if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic." - Lewis Carroll ( Dashiell Hammett quoted this bit by Tweedle-Dee when asked to name communists in Hollywood by the U.S. Senate)