Ubiquity’s Got Me Down

Music is the lubricant of life.  Sitting down to work it’s all gristle until there is music.  Then there is a current of movement and the obligations can flow along bouncing off rocks, spinning then proceeding, retired.

Hard Bop is my genre of choice to work to.  Inexhaustible, surely, though lately ubiquity’s got me down.  I can have any one, any time and I feel a bit stuck, going back over old classics, looking for the odd new contributor whom I’d never heard of.  For no good reason, tracing the thread of an old cassette probably, that I have in my mind from the days of a “box” atop my refrigerator on Pitt Street, I have made my way to Robert Schumann. 

Segues into “classical” music remind me of my early twenties, when I first allowed myself room to appreciate the vastness of all that came before recorded music in the twentieth century.  “Ahh,” I can remember thinking.  “Jazz is perfect to drive an automobile to or walk along to in an urban context, with sharp, start and stop rhythmic patterns and soaring then receding horns.  But “classical” is good to listen to when you drive around the countryside, or walk along a trail, where the flow is more open and the eye follows trees and sky instead of traffic lights and human density.

Robert Schumann had his very good days and his very bad days.  Reading the Wiki page now, I hadn’t realized that he was Brahms mentor.  He died at forty-six in an insane ward, the victim it appears of mercury poisoning, given, mistakenly at the time, to treat syphilis.  This, the same fate as Ge Hong, the Daoist alchemist.  Tough work, sampling ‘cures.’

In the other room they are watching a television station that only broadcasts shows about food and cooking.  It projects larger than life, on to our wall.  I sat down and tried to watch quietly.  But I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.  Now-showing was a cake-baking contest between two people who seemed dim and unfortunate and judges who were also unintelligent and cruel.  I can’t keep quiet and it’s clear my commentary isn’t much appreciated.  

And now my Schumann is not loud enough to drown these contestants out.  Clearly we need something to combat human density.  One group is insisting that their representation of the Lego aesthetic is more accurate. “Just look at these colors.  These are the Lego colors.”  I will have to reach for different music.