Posts focusing on live, recorded, remembered music
This past week, I’ve been meticulously cataloging Timothy’s music: collections, fake books, sheet music, instructional books with varying degrees of comprehensiveness… A few surprised me: The Rodgers & Hart Songbook? Paul Simon’s Greatest Hits? A couple made me smile, like Mancini’s “Peter Gunn” and The Bumper Book of Pub Favourites. …
It is a difficult enough thing to do, to go through one’s beloved’s belongings after they die. Clothes that still smell faintly of their cologne (patchouli, in Timothy’s case). Diaries with memos about dates you shared, appointments you didn’t, gifts given to you for anniversaries or birthdays. Items you know …
It may still be the bleak midwinter of the Christmas carols (see the post on Turning Corners), but new year’s day always makes me feel I should turn over some sort of new leaf, as if spring is already stirring under the snow. The neoclassical image of Janus is a …
For a kid growing up in the 1960s, Peanuts, inked by Charles Schultz, was a daily ritual in the funny papers. (My Mama still laughs at the Classic Peanuts in every weekday newspaper.) My addiction to All Things Peanuts was complete: Emulating Lucy van Pelt, I even produced a 5-cent …
The other day, while cleaning up some Inquisitive Mind Books listings on Amazon (and making sure An Abecedarium of Ornaments was in good order), I decided to give myself 10 minutes to browse the bajillions of music listings on the site. This wasn’t entirely random browsing. I keep a notepad …
One of the first LPs I purchased without thought or care about who else in my musical circle liked it was The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” in 1973 or thereabouts. I was a “theatre person,” a dancer, a poet, and not by any stretch a …
Maybe it’s because I’ve been immersed in the sweetly sentimental world of the latest Ken Burns (my hero!) film, on Country Music, these last few days. Maybe it’s the earlier sunsets, the surest sign we in the Northern Hemisphere have of the approaching winter. Mostly, it is because of what …
One of the more enjoyable aspects of cataloging every book and CD and DVD (and eventually LP album) that came out of my parents’ house is discovering some odd-ball treasure you would never have expected them to own. Some oddities in the collection are expected. I’ve already remarked elsewhere on …
