LIVE MUSIC

Many of my musician friends, who have invested much (blood and treasure) into developing their talents, lament the fact that professional musicians are not treated fairly. Bar owners or restauranteurs won’t pay them what they deserve. I understand their frustration, because some are very good, but that is unrealistic. The fact is that wherever we go we hear recorded and broadcast music. What would a live musician have to offer? Possibly, you might hear something live that you can’t hear otherwise. But some of the musicians I know want to reproduce without swerve the sounds they learned from recordings, so you can rule them out. So, musicians who improvise have the edge. They can surprise the listener, and respond instantly to the mood of the evening.

But that is only part of the story. An intangible element in live music is physical presence. If you are in a public place, and not far away there is an interesting and animated conversation, you find yourself drawn in and listening. You don’t respond that way to a conversation on the radio, however interesting.

However, what do musicians do? They might be five feet away from the audience, but they are using microphones and mixers. Their living presence and their actual sound-waves are mediated by machines. It is like using a cell-phone to talk with someone five feet away. On the other hand, I have seen musicians who drop their volume to almost a whisper when the audience seems to be drifting. The result, soon there are a dozen people sitting as close as they can without a sound. Other musicians in the same situation turn up the sound system, maybe to drown out conversation, and so people get louder and louder.

We like our toys and technology, but we are blind in our reliance on them. Photography can capture the moment without the labor of painting, but then we miss the pleasure of looking at something and figuring it out over a long period of time. Cars get us quickly where we want to go, but then we don’t care about the place we left in such a hurry, or all the places in between. Recorded music makes the best symphonies or edgiest music available in an instant, but takes away all the fun of making our own music.

Nothing to Say

Sometimes, like today, I have nothing to say, no songs to play, just debts to pay and get out of the way, but that’s okay.

If I were a real BLOGGER, instead of a dilettante, it would bother me. No great insight, no witty phrase for some old insight, no information. However, my main work is a translator, and I am well content that the stuff I translate is worthwhile, and so much better and more plenteous than what I could come up with. Back in the day, when I was a student, my teachers and colleagues assumed and desired that I should become a professor, but it was pretty clear in my mind that I did not have so much to say, but they had lots to say and the world should appreciate it and learn from it. And so it is.

Scary Parasites.

Thinking about getting a cat? Think twice. Cats carry the toxoplasma parasite. The parasite starts in a rat, and leads the rat to like the smell of the cat, and so get eaten. Some researchers have implicated the parasite in human schizophrenia. Here is the link: Toxoplasma Gondii Parasite.

Another nasty thing that cats carry is cat-scratch fever. More details here Cat scratch disease in Wikipedia. Once a kitten was introduced into the house, and it used to claw at the old dog's back leg. The dog became lame in that leg, but one vet gave antibiotics and the dog recovered. The antibiotics wore out, the dog got sicker yet, and the next vet looked at the x-rays and said it was bone cancer. The dog had to be put down. Cat scratch disease mostly affects the very young, the very old, and those who are immuno-compromised for various reasons. I read once that thirty percent of cats are carriers.

Yet another deadly parasite is the “racoon brain worm”. About which you can read here: Baylisascaris in Wikipedia. This little worm is happy in its definitive host, the racoon. However, if the eggs, which remain viable for years, and which are passed out in racoon feces, enter a paratenic host such as a human, they break out of the digestive system because they are unhappy, and travel to the brain, the eyes, the spinal cord. At each step the body defends itself, and so they keep moving. Eventually they die, but the human host can be very sick. I suspect that another dog succumbed that nasty bug, because it liked to eat stinky things and roll in them, and there were racoons in the backyard.