Tag Archives: human connection

Art, Culture, Humanity, Music, Society

Listen to All the Music, Do All the Things

Just try new things. Don’t be afraid. Step out of your comfort zones and soar, all right? Michele Obama

In a recent article in Aeon,  titled Now THAT was music, writer Lary Wallace sets the stage for his rather generalized conclusions on our ability (or inability, in his case) to appreciate new music. He starts with the assumption that we all experience this “One grim day (when youth is over)”  and “you find that new music gets on your nerves.”

“Some of us are more susceptible than others, ” he says with authority, “but eventually it happens to us all. You know what I’m talking about: the inability to appreciate new music – or at least, to appreciate new music the way we once did. There’s a lot of disagreement about why exactly this happens, but virtually none about when. Call it a casualty of your 30s, the first sign of a great decline. Recently turned 40, I’ve seen it happen to me – and to a pretty significant extent – but refuse to consider myself defeated until the moment I stop fighting.”

Why, he asks, do our musical tastes “freeze over”?

I got news for you Lary.  It really doesn’t happen to all of us.  I’m nearing 60 and love a wide range of new music.  I always have . I plowed through the 60s , 70s and 80s, and found something I’ve loved in every decade. I got busy with kids at the turn of the 21st century, but they kept me current on everything from technology to literature and music.  Today, my contemporary musical tastes range from Marian Hill,  Paloma Faith, Mumford and Sons, Passenger, Ed Sheeran and Kaleo to Van Morrison, Steely Dan, Jethro Tull, the Beatles and other classic musical artists.

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Art, Humanity, Philosophy, Reason

This is It

img_3168This is It
and I am It
and You are It
and so is That
and He is It
and She is It
and It is It
and That is That.  – James Broughton

These are conflicted times.  It’s easy to lose ourselves in the maze of social and mainstream media, to become disoriented by the barrage of information and confusing or unsettling news that inundates us at ever turn.  What’s real? What isn’t?  What’s truth? What’s lies? Where’s our place in the overall scheme of things?  And maybe “Why is this happening to us?” – whatever “this” might be.

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Culture, Humanity, Literature, Philosophy, Politics, Race, Social Justice, Society

Pass the Mic

How do we empower the people we call the voiceless?  Pass the mic.
 – Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, editor-in-chief of MuslimGirl.com, June 2016  panel at the White House’s United State of Women Summit

An editorial cultural-appropriationpiece by Lionel Shriver caught my eye in the Tampa Bay Times this morning.  Not familiar with Shriver’s work or immediately with the context of her situation as a keynote speaker at the Brisbane Writers Festival, the editorial puzzled me.

“Briefly, ” she wrote, “my address maintained that fiction writers should be allowed to write fiction — thus should not let concerns about “cultural appropriation” constrain our creation of characters from different backgrounds than our own. I defended fiction as a vital vehicle for empathy. If we have permission to write only about our own personal experience, there is no fiction, but only memoir. Honestly, my thesis seemed so self-evident that I’d worried the speech would be bland.”

As a writer and an avid reader, the topic interested me, and at first I couldn’t see what the issue was. Of course readers have to speak in other voices, and sometimes from the perspective of people different from themselves.  Without the ability to do that, we wouldn’t have Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird.   Right?

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