BEAUTIFUL APARTMENT

WOW is it great here (as you can tell from the above photo).  The sun is shining, clouds are moving, breeze is blowing, leaves are falling and it’s Sunday afternoon.  I have so much spare time today that I can write this entry.  Will this blog ever become “regular”?  I need something for irregularity.

 

          The birthday/housewarming party was great. I suppose since I only had a dozen seats, it would have been funny if everyone showed up,  but everyone who was invited but couldn’t come is still invited, anytime.  I have friends, and my life has improved - a wonderful present.

          It’s been quite a week.  Got sick, got well, met Bob Fass, one of my idols – hope he watches my show and responds – also gave him an album.  (See Wiki if his name does not ring a bell!)  Thanks to my old friend Barbara Bernstein-Perrucci for the introduction from afar (FLA).

Saw some good movies at the festival, missed a lot of them…couldn’t be as involved this year.  Usually I volunteer for the panel that selects films and also I volunteer at the Festival itself (Vermont International Film Festival), which gets better every year.  But as I was saying, I was busy moving for two or three months.  I missed most of the Summer.  Not a good thing up here, but I was blessed to be able to move into a nice place in town from a deteriorating situation (and capped it with the first party in years).

To sum up:

I had a swinging funky cheap top-floor apartment (rented condo with the landlord 100 miles away - his only Unit) next to a ravine in the rear corner of a former Army base: Fort Ethan Allen.  I was surrounded by gigantic trees, on a hill overlooking a beaver dam and marsh, a forest with wildlife, the sound of leaves blowing, frogs croaking at night, etc.  It was almost impossible to see the trailer park on the other side of the ravine, and right on the bus-line to town.  (I thought the bus was going to take out my mailbox more than once. About 40 passed on a typical day, counting both directions.)  But - very impressive location, and a nice old house from 1900, with modest but lovely woodwork.  Even a stained-glass window on the landing!  (The stairs were inside the door, which was way at the bottom.)  It’s true nothing was level, and there were no 90 degree angles, but I loved it.

Eight years passed.  My cat got sick and died.  People finally bought the empty place downstairs.  They had it for a few years, painted the whole house blue instead of the faded yellow it had been, moved to the state of Washington, and let a real estate agent sell it.  Finally bought by a young couple who were actually surprised to find out someone lived upstairs.  (?)  My presence irked them (hearing my music and movies).  Their irkness in turn irked me.  Oh well.

A few years ago, we started getting storms with violent winds.  A gigantic 100-year-old Maple fell from the edge of the forest onto our lawn, knocking over five other trees to join it in the front yard.  They covered half the lawn, so it looked a lot worse for a while.  In back, a gigantic tree that had been leaning more and more towards my house through the years slowly fell in the back yard (it took a week, honestly) and finally went down at 1:30 one morning, narrowly missing the house (thank you!), but taking out a few other trees.  That too took a while to cut up and remove.  (Somebody was doing somebody a favor, or something.)

My second neighbor next door had been a friend: a reporter for the biggest local paper – we saw each other almost daily.  But finally he got into an adversarial relationship with his landlady (for good reason) and found somewhere else which was nicer. He has now moved back to Ann Arbor, Michigan in preparation for a six-month tour of India.

Next, his landlady rented that apartment to a young man with a lot of “friends”.  The first night that he slept at his girlfriend’s house, two men came with a U-Haul and removed all his valuable stuff (giant TV, computers, etc.).  He had no idea who could have done it – though it was pretty obvious it was someone who knew he’d be gone (one of his “friends”).  He didn’t learn from this.  He got even more “friends”, and the driveway filled with cars every night of the week.  They parked on a diagonal.  The place was surrounded by empty parking lots (especially on weekends) but they all parked in the driveway (used for the four apartments in the two houses here).  They argued in the driveway.  The new neighbor had to be told when he was blasting music at 3:00 AM: he didn’t notice the time or the volume, because he was drunk.  He then got 3 DUIs.

I forced my own hand when I made up my mind to have a CO Detector.  I mean – it was an old house, with mice in the walls.  I had plenty to complain about.  Accidents could happen; it was a wooden house, and not "up to Code".  I asked the Town to inspect the place.  (I had written to the landlord asking what to do, and he had responded by not responding – for a year, then another, and another.)  So I forced his hand, and thereby my own.  He fixed the electricity problems and got a CO Detector.  Then, he started raising the rent - the same year I started running out of money. 

[Long story short.]

I applied for subsidized housing, and qualified.  I awaited the possibility of moving to a place I could afford.  I started throwing things away.  News finally came a year later, and I was offered a very nice apartment in town.  It’s perfect, in a locked building where one never hears one’s neighbors - a renovated turn of the century factory building solidly made of beams and bricks.  The people are nice, the place is great, and I believe in good luck.  

It's a sort of dream come true.  What can I say - come on over!  Also - never give up.

REVIEW OF “CBGB” THE MOVIE 10-13-13

(Admittedly, I watched a grainy copy on Youtube)

          I wasn’t there from the beginning like some people (Binky for one) because I was in a folk-rock band; the club was already headed in another direction by 1976.  Nobody I hung around with went there – partly because we were penniless. Finally one of my bands played there in 77 and after that I could get in free most nights; it was a clubhouse once you played there (unless Lisa was at the door). 

First show I saw at CBs was Richard Hell and the Voidoids.  That was when the stage was still on the left side – the right side had the pool table.  Later, the pool table moved to way up near the entrance, on the left, the stage moved back and to the right wall.  I told Bob Quine he was great and he said they (and he) had sucked.  No egotist was he.  Later I saw Ivan Julian and the Outsets (the other guitarist with Hell).

I saw Talking Heads just after Jerry Harrison joined, Patti Smith before she had an album out, The Ramones (how do they memorize these sets?), The Planets (wow!), Tuff Darts (after Robert left, darn it), Wayne County (what?), The Miamis, The Cramps (whoa!), Alex Chilton, The Fall, The Nitecaps, Bad Brains (another jaw-dropper), Blondie, Violent Femmes, etc.  Anybody else remember Humans From Earth, Tragic Flaw, The Erasers, Helen Wheels, Bush Tetras?  All great, all different.  How about “Suicide”?  There was a band he took a chance on!  They were famous for getting booed offstage.  They played there a lot, too. 

Wish I’d seen the Police, Devo or the Butthole Surfers there, but of course most bands who weren’t well-known would play at 2 AM on a weekday night.  I had to work in the morning.  By then, I wasn’t penniless.

The movie – for me it was overwhelmed by the allusion to comics that came from Punk Magazine, and by dwelling on Alan Rickman and his dog so much and the people and music so little.  There were so many kinds of music…DNA, Walter Stedding?  Rhys Chatham?  They had to keep it simple to make it a movie, but I’d have loved some sort of list of bands (not the one too tiny to read which is used in the background at one point).  Does anyone else remember Hilly announcing the acts onstage?  I never saw him do that…I do remember David Byrne shouting (as if there was no microphone in front of his face) “The name of this band is Talking Heads!” which became the name of their first live double album.

Um…I never heard of anyone doing an audition for just the staff – there were Monday Night Auditions every week.  If you had a lot of friends, or were good, you’d be back on a “real” night.  I’ll never forget having to guard our equipment for six hours, from sound-check to show-time.  And if the next band climbed onstage before you were all packed up?  Goodbye wires and pedals…

I heard the Police drew about ten people their first gig there.  (In Austin they got only three, but one was a DJ who started playing “Roxanne” a lot and broke them into having a hit in the States.  A lesson there, eh?)

          I’m not sure the Dead Boys were as dominant a band as it seems they are in the film.  (But watch them live at CBs in 1977 on Youtube – 20 minute set that kicks ass.)  Hilly managed half a dozen over the years, I think.  Remember “The Big Fat Pet Clams From Outer Space”?  He managed them.  They were older guys, and not very original or good.  I thought they sucked.  What was he thinking?

          Hilly was gruff and growly, muttering and shouting, but not as cocky and weaselly as Rickman.  Nice dog.  The shit – ugh.  It could be dark in there, and everything was painted black.  Anywhere it was just sheetrock (like the “dressing room”) was covered in magic-markered band names.  So were the toilets downstairs.  One toilet was smashed or out of order. Men’s room mirror - smashed.  Men’s room door was torn off, never replaced.  It smelled down there…actually you could smell it almost as soon as you passed the stage on your way back.

          Just inside the front door was a bottle-neck space for customers to get their money out, show their IDs, and pay at a little table and chair.  (Coat check?) Pay phone to the right, pinball machine right behind ticket-taker.  Very long bar.  Lead singer of The Revelons, another great band, was a bartender.

          No mention of the “Live at CBGBs” double album produced by Kim King?  It sold a bunch!  Lot of good bands on it – Miamis, Mink DeVille, Tuff Darts (with Robert!), and a few others.  But no Ramones, Blondie or Heads – already signed, so no go.

          Odd, the music they chose for some scenes.  First time we see Patti Smith she does “Because the Night”?  That was years later.  No keyboard visible on that or on Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer”, though you can hear one…

          I remember lots of lights and deafeningly loud bands – hard to get that effect in a movie - probably impossible. And the crowd right up to the stage on both available sides – people hanging off the walls (standing on pipes and on each other) and those odd life-sized posters of people like Sarah Bernhardt and Chaplin onstage became more and more covered with graffiti.  No stickers on the walls for decades, as Jahn mentioned. That place got Packed on a busy night.  Wall to wall people, all night.  Lucky thing it had a high ceiling (which we don’t see in the movie) cause the smoke didn’t hang right in your face (everyone smoked back then). 

          No mention of him investing in a $100,000 sound system and equipment to tape live shows.  Best sound of any club in the city.

          Too bad they didn’t have someone play James Chance or Lydia Lunch!  I suppose they’d have to pay a fortune to mention The Plasmatics, who were one of their biggest draws.  They didn’t mention the marathon all-weekend benefit show to raise money for Johnny Blitz’s hospital bill!  There was a commemorative t-shirt – saw it for years after.  It had a list of all the bands on it – dozens of the best.  Must be worth a dollar now!  Faded in the wash, I suppose…

          There was quite a while when a band had to make a choice – if you played at Max’s you couldn’t play CBs, and vice-versa.  Heartbreakers were Max’s, Sid Vicious was Max’s, Iggy was Max’s.  (And by the way, in “Sid and Nancy” they show Sid doing shows to an empty house near the end – never happened!  The place was packed every show, all the way to his last.)

          So – I enjoyed the movie up to a point, but I kept seeing Rickman and his dog instead of things I was more interested in.  A boy and his dog.  

Dennis Dunn, unmentioned ace lighting man, I salute you!  (He was there for years – and his brother was sound man a long time.)  So was Rudy (of The Hard).  I salute you all.

          I do hope the Kristals make money from the movie.  It was one of the great clubs, and we’ll ne’er see its like again.  Here’s to Hilly and the 70s!  Gone, gone, they are gone.

Well, things are starting to look good around here.  Boxes are disappearing like an endangered species.  In my closet, however, boxes are still king.  But that will change!  I have to concentrate on the actual rooms for a week or so, putting up pictures, replacing three translucent plastic file boxes (of different sizes, like papa, mama, and baby bear) with a swell "wooden" file cabinet of only two drawers, meaning it doesn't tower over anything.  It's shorter than the desk. 
I performed this miracle of economy (of space) by throwing out a thousand papers!  Did I need my receipts, bills, applications, job detritus from 2008 back?  You bet I didn't.  I find it hard to believe how long I can put these things off.  My therapist has shown me that I have mistaken my "stuff" for my self.  But now that I'm in a smaller space, I can no longer sustain that illusion!  And it's just as well.
Very soon now (which is to say tomorrow) I will send out invites to my housewarming and birthday party.  I'll have a Facebook Event Page for the first time...when you're in Rome, eh?
I hope you enjoy the new blog cover photo - it's the view from my window on a beautiful day.  Today was one just like that.  And I'm happy to say that there will soon be room for company to enter and actually enjoy this as a comfortable space, fringed with wonders, with plenty of room to move around, and places to sit, etc.  Gosh.  I feel less like a recluse already.  Hooray for progress.  Until the morrow!

Well, now I know why I have no comments.  I tried to leave one myself - three times - and it will not take them!  Why, oh why?  I hope to figure it out later.  Perhaps I'll look up "troubles with Blogger" and posting comments, etc.  Hang in there!

NEW ENTRY 9-6-2013 

I AM BACK!

          And on the Seventh Day, I arose and was Resurrected unto the Internet.  With 81 emails to peruse (Facebook has no way for them to be sent in any kind of digest form, thanks so much) and he is liberated from his cave.  The Rock he rolled away was Fairpoint, and a heavy rock it was.  Let me give you some idea – but first – let me say that it is good to speak to you again, my “friends”.  Most of all, to my Friends, darn it.  That’s right.  The people with whom I’ve “had a face-to-face”.

          [I cannot stand these modern language quirks, changing slang which obscures and  does not clarify.  It is a source of great annoyance to an old grouch to see phrases like “They’re taking a wait-and-see approach,” or “It’s a win-win situation.”  In the first case, one would have said, “They’ll wait and see what happens.”  In the second case, one would have said, “Everybody wins.”  Is that difficult?  Thank you. “At this point in time” indeed – what were we ever to think: at this point in space?]

          It is as Easter, and I have emerged from my Egg.

          It’s been a long time.  I wanted to have this tirade over with, because as I write this, the mighty Fairpoint boulder in my path still will not budge.  Every day I call them, saying “where’s my service?” and they reply, “It will return to you at your new address today or tonight.”  So far, empty words.  But when they finally come through, I’ll have this written so I can post it right away.  I yearn to surf the Internet once more.  I wouldn’t mind having my fucking phone back either.

          Let me fill you in, my Friends and “friends”.  I knew I was to leave my old place by Thursday August 29^th, so that I could clean the emptied apartment on the 30^th, and have the landlord inspect it on the 31^st, and on September1st I’d never return to my old place.  Thursday was the day to get everything (furniture and boxes) which were too large for me to carry alone in my many car trips (about 15) throughout August.  (The System dictated that I pay rent on two apartments for one month, at the same time.  Ho ho.  They engineered my solicitation of a Grant from a community organization which rescued people with various housing emergencies.)  I knew I’d better get going, because I had a lot of Stuff.  Too much stuff.  So much stuff that I had to get rid of about half of it to fit into my swell new apartment.  So for the entire month of August, I’ve been moving and doing little else.  Well, really nothing else except eating and sleeping, and not too much of either.

My basement storage in the old house (built 1900) was the size of a garage.  Many things had I stored there.  Over the dank years, books grew musty, and whatever would not fit into my apartment would brood for years (8 in total) in stacks, rows and layers of boxes, five gallon cans (long story), milk boxes (in case of flood), shovels and mops, the landlord’s tools he never retrieved in all this time,  and lots of stacked windows and doors (his).  A charcoal barbecue on four legs, an extra desk, an extra rocker (obviously left out in the rain a while, it was mostly good for getting splinters – swell 1920s design though), a squirrel trap (needed only once, thank goodness), a cat-carrier with the handle broken off (convenient!), my bicycle and bike-rack, broken cinderblocks, about 500 copies each of two of my CDs, hundreds of music magazines from decades past, important issues of The Times (the passing of Frank Sinatra on page one, etc.), Interview, much of my art from phases past (every submission, poster, and leftover from 13 issues of Big Fish  (a literary magazine my brother and I put out in the early 1990s); my drawings, collages, tiny sculptures spot-welded in my spare time in a body-shop job in 1985 (long story there); and my daughter’s boxes of personal items too heavy to travel with her on the plane to Cleveland, Tennessee last year.

Lastly, a half dozen large boxes of sentimentalia left in my care by default from my parents’ Florida condo, which my son Joseph and I disassembled and sent North after Dad split the scene in early 2000.  By default I mean: my brothers wished for some items, my son wanted to drive their low-mileage Buick Century back to Colorado, and I wanted a few things too.  I had the moving company send them their choices (Joseph of course drove his away), gave lots of furniture and dishes and lamps away, and kept the rest to dispose of later.  Are you sentimental? Are you a packrat?  (Guilty.)

          So – for this move I had to make some really tough choices, knuckle down and bite the bullet, get there somehow, and make lemonade out of life’s lemons.  Actually I have been drinking a lot of lemonade these days, since cider is out of season for a while.  And a lot of this August move was during a heat wave. (Newman’s is on sale at Shaw’s – must go tomorrow, last day of sale.)

          Most interestingly, I feel as if the Old me packed the boxes, and the New me has to unpack them.  I must say – what a jerk.  Would you look at the junk this guy saved?  And this is after his making “tough choices”!  What a wimp.  Many many more things are going.  I’ve got it up to here, people.

There’s a table down in the community room, off the laundry room, where items are displayed for Free, and those who wish take them.  My unused sleeping bag (long story) only stayed about 5 minutes.  Curtains, tapes, CDs, a fancy hatbox holding a top-heavy glass bowl my insane ex-girlfriend left in a cupboard (perhaps that’s a bit harsh).  I certainly made my own mistakes in that affair – but I never brought 30 pounds of chicken feed to an apartment with no chickens, in case I ever had chickens again during my lifetime.

          AS I was saying, I knew I had to take the Furniture and bed and all, and start sleeping at the new apartment, my magnificent Palace of Boxes, on August 29^th.  So I called my dear DSL, Fairpoint, and asked them to switch me over on Friday the 30^th.  I had to take the computer apart and put it in boxes on the 28^th, but I knew, or thought I did, that it could be up and running at the new place the following day.  I might not be able to re-assemble it until the 31^st, but I did have to box it on the 28^th, so I called Fairpoint up and asked about Saturday the 30^th.  They said that if they didn’t do it on Friday, (because of the holiday weekend), it would have to wait until Tuesday, so I said, “Okay, do it on Friday!” and they said, “Okay, Friday it is!”  We each wrote it down.  (I thought.)

          On Friday, I picked up the phone to call my brother.  He’d helped me move the previous day. I had 3 excellent helpers (Bob, Peter and Kevin, my trinity of brains and brawn) with a U-Haul 14 footer.  I will tell you of them, and moving day, next post.  $90 plus tips, basically – astoundingly cheap, as befits a fellow like me who is astoundingly cheap.  But every number I called resulted in a timid, quietly recorded English as a second-language message saying “outgoing calls cannot be made from this telephone.”  Then another louder and more assured voice would say, “This is Fairpoint.”  And then the robot would ponderously announce the choice of buttons to press.  Then, “Is this in regards to (previous tenant’s number)?  If yes, press one, if no press two.”  I faithfully pressed two.  It then asked what number I was asking about, and I told it. 

After an eternity on Hold, I spoke with a woman who told me that the phone was scheduled to be installed at my new address next Tuesday.  “What?” I politely shouted.  I explained that we had agreed on Friday.  She replied that the form she was reading said Tuesday.  I was taken aback.  When, after several such calls, I asked to speak to a supervisor, I returned to Hold Limbo and was finally rewarded with a fellow who seemed to have even less to say.  He wasn’t sorry, he offered no suggestions.  I then grew hot, and demanded their mistake be fixed as soon as possible.  I wanted credit for the missing days of service, and to speak to someone who wanted to help.  He had nothing to say.  I said, “Well, let me speak to the President.”  He hung up on me. 

I guess it was my fault – I used the word “goddam”.  I think that qualified as “clerk abuse” and got him out of the conversation on a technicality.  Poor lad - after all, it wasn’t his fault.  In addition, he was in no position to help.  He was also in no position to express that he was sorry, which was infuriating.  But, no one cared.  Some say Customer Service is a thing of the past, but they still call themselves that. 

          The next time I called, I was assured that service would resume on Tuesday.  I was told I could then find someone to complain to, and to converse with about their truly unacceptable mistake. 

          Tuesday came and went.  I write this on Wednesday; it too has come and gone.  I called Fairpoint early this morning on the (thank god) free phone for tenants’ use off the community kitchen in the basement.  After traveling through Hold Limbo once again, and the tedious selection of generic choices, I spoke with a human.  She assured me that the Dispatcher had re-assigned my re-connection to a service person, who would come today and flip a switch in the basement(!).  It could happen anytime up to 5:00 PM – in fact, service might not resume until as late as midnight.  (I hoped they didn’t enforce such long hours on their people – my son is a Comcast serviceman in Denver, and he has told me some real Stories.)

          It is now 11:06 PM, and I do not have phone or internet service.  I write this in anticipation of the inevitable re-connection of my phone and internet. When I do get them, which I pray will be no later than tomorrow, I shall post this on my blog and put a link to it on Facebook for all my faces to see.  I will have returned from the dead.  (I will still be Jewish, though.)

          In the morning, I will call them again.  Again, both the customer service person and I will tsk together, and wonder how things went so awry.  And then, when finally I am online again, I can go to the Fairpoint website and attempt, from this remote outpost, to rip them a new one.

          In the meantime, I have been unpacking, rethinking, judging distances for the wires I will HAVE TO BUY AND TACK UP ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE APARTMENT MYSELF which I feel I should not have to buy.  When I switched to Fairpoint from Comcast, the wires were already installed at the old place.  But, they said that if they had to “set foot” in my apartment they would charge $99.  I’m sure they’re considering that a Service, but somehow I feel I have been dealt a Disservice. 

          I must add though, in conclusion, that it may have been a blessing in disguise (an ugly one) because I have had much more time to unpack and become the new Me on my little isolated island.  Soon, I will rejoin the mainland.  It will be good to be back in the World.

          How have you all been? 

          Well, it is now Thursday night.  This afternoon, an intelligent, charming, competent service-man knocked on my door.  I greeted him, and asked, “Is this going to cost $99?”  “As soon as I step in,” he said, and smiled.  Then he said no, it wouldn’t cost anything.  He came in, and marveled at how complex the situation is here: the phone jack is nowhere near an outlet, and these days a landline consists of a charger and a handset, so the phone jack needs to be somewhere near an electrical outlet.  Here, that is not the case.  I had to buy a 50 foot wire at Radio Shack to string around the kitchen, up and down the opposite wall to where the modem would be.  We shook our heads in disbelief.  I had to use a ten foot wire for the phone, in order to reach an outlet for the charger, also. 

          He went about his business, just as if I’d paid $100 for the hour it took him to get me connected again.  We both knew that it was not an extra service, because without that visit there would be no service here.  He was a very nice guy.  When he left, I had my 81 new emails and my telephone.  Just this morning, my brother Ken had come by to see if I was okay – they hadn’t heard from me in days.  Imagine!  That was nice of him, and he came up, and I showed him my new place.  Now both brothers have been here.  Nice place – all agree.  

          I hear the chimes of midnight.  That means I must leave you.  Goodnight, dear Friends (and strangers).  Why don’t you leave a comment?  or “Follow” me.  My blog has been read  over 1000 times, but I have no followers or comments.  I guess I just don’t Have It.  But thanks for coming, and my next post will tell of moving day.  I took pictures of the empty, cleaned previous apartment in the late afternoon sun of last Saturday…dreamy.

          But, not as dreamy as this place will be once I throw out about 4 cubic yards of memorabilia and irrelevant items of sentimental attachment.  Yellowing New Yorker cartoons from decades past?  Please.  I need room to move, to stretch out, to pace, to have people over, to gaze out the windows lost in thought, to build a new life in the here and now.  But, as I said, it’s midnight.

          Sincerely,

New Charlie.

Here's midway in an internet discussion about: http://rdstreets.hubpages.com/hub/Top-10-Reasons-Why-the-Music-Industry-is-Failing

Russell Josephson Interesting. But while the music INDUSTRY is failing, there is still plenty of great music being made, and it's more available than ever.

me:

You know, that "available" thing is tricky.  People stare at their screens and use their Ipods to hear MP3s instead of sitting with their friends in front of a stereo with sound 20 times better on vinyl.  (A good stereo system helps.)  Friends used to turn each other on to music – hey, listen to this new band!  But now we find it on the internet.  Of course, on the internet the music tries to make money...they put a spin on it – “it's all available!” - and they deliver an inferior product that can hardly hold your attention because it's so compressed and miniaturized.  So, my dissenting opinion is that music is less available than ever, because the radio doesn't play what the DJ likes, the DJ plays what the station's computer tells them to.  And they’re very strict about target audiences and Types of music, keeping them separate from other kinds of music.  You used to walk by a bar, club, record store, any kind of place with a jukebox, and hear truly new things.  You would ask someone – what was that?   But the major companies are timid and conservative now.  Nothing with an "original" sound.

You see what I'm saying?   The industry creates the illusion that we are exposed to a giant variety of music, but that's always been true. Fewer than ever are those who have made it through the maze of business that is The System.  Either they are the new big thing or they are nothing. They are fresh today and gone tomorrow.  The market determines the music more than ever.  The music I like is always obscure, never "pop"  I listen to music of all eras, but the money is in pushing "new" music. They act like "fresh" is the most important thing, but fresh gets stale.  As Dylan said on one of his radio shows, "There's a lot more old music than there is new music."

I agree plenty of great music is being made, but it’s sure not discovered the same ways.  “This is a song I like from a great band” has become “This is a song that meets important criteria.”

On Facebook today there was a giant discussion of "what are the worst songs"?  My contribution, comment #150 or so...

 This is a real survey on the worst songs?  This is such a vein to mine.  There are so many. Yeah, American Pie is up there, but if he'd kept it to 3 minutes it wouldn't be - maybe.  (Did you know Winchester Cathedral was written by the guy who wrote There's a Kind of Hush?)  For worst songs there is so much competition.  Today I listened to "Something in the Air," which I'd read about many times - back then I wanted to try the album, but had no record player or money at the time.  So when I heard it today, someone said it was in commercials and all over - pervasive, ubiquitous. And it was very familiar!  But I have no memory of listening to it EVER.  It bypassed my consciousness and got in without me knowing!  Now there's a catchy tune!  Like a virus.  So many "worst" songs.  Feelings.  I leave the room if I hear Jingle Bell Rock.  I left a dozen parties back in the 1980s whenever they played Prince stuff from Purple Rain - can't remember which one was the worst of that album.  Now any song that goes boom boom boom boom on the bass drum is an ordeal.  Skrillex and a thousand other DJs have made this stuff popular?  Oh hell, it started with Disco and never left.  Worst songs...How much is that Doggie in the Window.  God is on the bus.  Anything arranged by Mitch Miller.  Billy don't be a hero.  Seasons in the Sun.  I'd say Walking on Sunshine, but I've finally appreciated what great production that song has.  The guitar player did it, I think, and went on to other things.  Let's call the whole thing off.

Jesus.  I post a nice long piece, and on the very day I do this, my blog decides to file it in the right hand column.  I must look into this. 
This is AUGUST.  Be sure to click on anything that says it's from AUGUST.  When I put a piece up, I expect it to stay up!  Don't make me come over there...