Catching Up, Tying Together

 John wrote some reflections on the music suggested to me, and I will leave those comments as an appendix. 

A slogan of the language-learning blog AJATT (All Japanese All the Time) was -- and I just verified still is -- "You don't learn a language, you get used to it."  And it is that kind of learning through familiarity, a kind of growing into a domain, that listening to a new album allows me. So I am glad that I used machine logic and strategic planning to give myself this thing to enjoy.  To remind, the game plan for happiness is to be stupid, selfish and healthy.  I think inverting all three and avoiding the extreme of that inverse is what is more accurate: don't be too smart (disembodied/"in your head"), don't get so unhealthy that all you think of is your ailments, and don't be so selfless that you lose yourself, which I am very prone to do.  And did again while I was in survival mode with this job. The albums as interests are about taking something that mine.

But to be honest, many a time the real problem is that I am overstimulated, so music isn't always the solution. I often need silence (let's just keep linking to old pieces).

The more important intervention is the hypergraphia [ibid]. When I have sunk into depression, it is going back to the power of jotting down what is positive -- mostly on the physical and sensual levels -- and doing so in a contextless fashion, that improves my mood.

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Enter John:

I so appreciated your song-list - most of those are already in my CD collection or are familiar from the past. Probably not a minute I have spent listening to Radiohead in my life has been wasted. I don't currently have Revolver - one of many that I had on the now defunct Minidisc for many years - but one episode of Mad Men I saw recently ends with Tomorrow Never Knows, sounding great on my stereo, and the episode really emphasises what a break it was from the past: I Wanna Hold Your Hand era was fresh, but the Mad Men characters manage to find something from decades before that was similar. But Tomorrow Never Knows was a whole new planet. It's hard to remember The Beatles and The Beach Boys were once neck and neck rivals - Revolver was the album that blasted The Beatles permanently ahead.

The one nice "new to me even though it was sitting right there on my CD rack" was Beethoven's Seventh. I don't know why, because I love the 3rd, 5th, particularly 6th, and 9th...but there's something forbidding about finding one's way into a new one. I think it's all the numbers. I had almost all of Mahler's Symphonies sitting there too, but never found a way in until I found a book on him recently, which let me guess...I should just start with the fourth.

 

Beethoven's Seventh though....to me is so *danceable*, but it would have to be social dancing. I know this music was never for dancing, always concerts, but still. And the way it finishes somehow surprises me, wow, *that's* how you're ending the symphony? Contemporaries thought the whole thing madness. (And at first performance Mahler's 4th was booed after each movement....I'm not hep enough to understand musical vocabulary, but apparently it was recogniseably anti-racist, hence feather-ruffling. To me it's just fun, apart from the slow movement which had me crying).

 

Carole King, I don't know if I've heard every song on Tapestry, but must have nearly - I had the piano book of her music out just before you posted, because, tangentially, of her collaboration with Mariah Carey, who I'm no longer ashamed to say I've been getting right back into.....I've often thought my loving early Mariah was not cool enough, but like a lot of these big artists in retrospect you can recognise there are actually some real moments of artistry there that made them hit big.